ABSTRACT
Most of the stereotyped business of joint committees is unimportant, being nothing more than the routine characteristic of any organized group. These ordinary and routinized affairs of committees are, however, worth noting since they furnish indices of habits and customs. But, what an investigator really wishes to know about an organized group is the manner of its functioning when confronted with situations which call for choices, decisions. Events of this nature tend to become the nodal points by which the activities of the group are recollected and recorded ; such records attain increasing importance since they become incorporated in the control tradition of the group. It is these events which describe the quality of the social process, and when they leave their traces in permanent records they constitute one of the major data-sources for research. 1
