Consumption and Group Behavior

Direct Selling Organizations:

• Nicole Woolsey Biggart (1989):Charismatic, Missionary zeal, Female, often homemakers.
• Dimaggio (1990): income, marital power and sense of community, but "pre-feminist."
• Amway, Mary Kay, Avon

Buying Clubs: Sam's Club

Home Shopping Network: First Auction (Internet Shopping Network)

Formal Organizations

People as Joiners

• Humans as Social Animals
• Groups and their impact on social interaction.
• Or, maybe not...

GROUP:

• A collection of people interacting together in an orderly way on the basis of shared norms, values and expectations about one another's behavior.
• vs. aggregate, vs. category.
• Groups develop their own internal structure: norms, value, statuses, roles. They can be rigid and formal or loose and flexible.
• There is a sense of belonging, individuals identify with the group. Outsiders are distinguished from members and treated differently.
• Groups are formed for a PURPOSE--specific or diffuse.
• People in a group tend to be similar, and the more they participate, the more similar they become.
• Groups and changing social structure

TYPES OF GROUPS:

In and Out Groups

• Ethnocentrism, often fostered by the group
• We versus They
• Feeling of distinctiveness and superiority
• "In group virtues/Out group vices"

Reference Groups

• Any group we use to evaluate ourselves, don't necessarily belong.
• Normative function: set and enforce standards of conduct and belief.
• Comparison function: a standard by which people can measure themselves or others.
• Anticipatory socialization.
• Pain and Religion: Jews and Protestants, Jews display 20% greater tolerance.
• Marketing: Target Groups- "Harley" Cigarettes

SMALL GROUP DYNAMICS

• May be primary or secondary.
• Interaction is simultaneous
• Patterns and predictability: Cecilia Ridgeway: non-verbal behavior and dominance--eye contact, posture
• Size: Most important determinate of the type of interaction. As size increases, structure changes, and therefore interaction.
• Simmel: Small group as distinctive, not needing formal structures found in larger.
• Dyad: unstable and intense, members must take each other into account.
• Triad: stability, 3rd as unifier, mediator, coalitions (deals, negotiations), divide and rule.
• Range in size from 2-20: Up to 7 or 8, all can take part in interaction.
• Qualities of activity varies as the relative number increases: dominance, non-participation, etc: The smallest groups are more constraining, but offer more intimacy and individuality; As size increase, freedom increases, but intimacy declines and the emerging group structure tends to limit individuality.
• 6 vs. 12 person juries: No difference on not guilty, but juries with 12 members are more hesitant to produce a guilty verdict.
• As more people are added to the group, complexity increases, subdivisions appear.
• At 10-12 formal leaders become distinguished.
• Gradual change is accommodated, sudden change disrupts interaction and there is often resistance.
• Multicultural groups.

Leaders:

• Always present, product of group needs and situation.
• Two types of leaders:
• Instrumental: task oriented, planning and directing.
• Expressive: consensus building, within group support.
• Both roles may be performed by a single individual, but often there are two different "leaders."
• Leaders tend to fall from popularity, especially instrumental.
• Style:
1. Authoritarian: Orders and organizes. Directs (less likely to accept input from members).
2. Democratic: Solicits group input, coordinates joint efforts.
3. Laissez-faire: "Hands-off" approach
4. Leadership style is relevant to type and purpose of group.

Group Decision Making

• Diversity and creativity

1. Minorities often less active and less committed.
2. Basic inequalities reproduced in group context.
3. Determinate vs. indeterminate tasks.
• Risky and Tame Shift: responsibility is diffused.
• Conformity and Groupthink.
• Conformity --going along with one's peers (Asch)
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRh5qy09nNw
  
• Consensus. After decision is agreed upon, effort is made to reunite members.

Physical Environment

• Room Size: Big room--members will group together, small room, members spread out.
• Windows,
Chair Comfort: Distractions.
• Table Shape and chair placement: Sides and opposition.
• All these factors (and more) shape the interaction that occurs

FORMAL ORGANIZATIONS

• Large secondary groups that are deliberately and rationally designed to achieve specific objectives.
• Carefully designed structure.
• Status clearly separated from the individual.
• Designed for efficiency: BUREAUCRATIC
• Vary in size.
• Fulfill a variety of personal and social needs.
• Impact all our lives.
• So dominant that we create formal organizations to supervise and coordinate other organizations.

Development:

• Link to emergence of centralized governments: Incas, Egypt, China
• Coordination of agricultural development: irrigation networks.

Growth and Dominance

• Crafts and Guilds
• Industrialization: Regulate work force, Large scale coordination.
• Mass production, maximize profit. As technology improved, sophisticated management emerged to maximize production in order to serve new markets brought about by improved transportation and consumer demand.
• McDonaldization: Increasing controls and standardization, Irrationality, Technological dominance

Types:

• Utilitarian
• Coercive
• Voluntary
• Voluntary Associations--around 22,000, 30% up since1980.
• AAA=29 million members
• School Bus Manufacturers=5
• Functional in shift from community based to formal base: Mutual Aid Societies.
• Wide variety of reasons and types: Self-help; AA new image of self and biography.
• Not random: Membership takes $, SES higher, female and 1/5 male exclusively.

• Functional:

1. Mediate government/individual: political force
2. Training in organization skills.
3. Minority representation: NAACP, AARP
4. Social control and regulation: impose norms, assist in government activities: resettle refugees, Drug awareness and prevention, neighborhood watch.

• Conflict:

1. Little credit for skills developed through volunteer work
2. Often viewed as "female" work, filling the days of the wives of the Captains of Industry

• Interactionism

  1. Self expression
  2. Reference groups

BUREAUCRACY

• Commonsense impressions
• Language--Doublespeak
• The structure of the Formal Organization (the "government")
• Wikipedia on bureaucracy

WEBER: IDEAL TYPE

Bureaucratization as a Process

The Evolution of Bureaucratization: McDonaldization

Bureaucracy as a negotiated Order:

• Bureaucracy's Other Face:
• Classical theory/scientific management VS Human Relations Approach
1. Classical: $, performance standards, hard supervision, worker as another machine.
2. Human: informal groups, human needs, Hawthorne Plant
3. Piece-rate vs. informal rules; chiseler; rate buster.
• Blau-FBI; rather than look stupid and ask supervisor, develop strategies, "interesting case," in order to solicit advice from peers.
• "Banana Time" (Roy, 1959): How workers informally structure the work environment to make it more meaningful. How productivity and satisfaction relate more to the quality of informal social interaction than to the official rules and rewards of the organization.

Organizational Change:

• Resistance
• Bureaucratic enlargement
• Goal succession (some avoid: Rooney and Skid row missions-succeed through failure; also DEA) and goal multiplication (YMCA)

Back to Groups

Back to small group dynamics

The changing structure of society

Deviance and Conformity



URL: http://www.umsl.edu/~keelr/010/groups.html
Owner: Robert O. Keel rok@umsl.edu
References and Credits for this Page of Notes
Last Updated: Wednesday, May 26, 2010 12:25 PM