Sociology Essay; “without groups social life is impossible”
Social groups can be defined as a group consisting of two or more people who regularly interact
on the basis of mutual expectations and who share a common identity. It is easy to see from this
definition that we all belong to many types of social groups: our families, our different friendship
groups, the sociology class and other courses we attend, our workplaces, the clubs and
organizations to which we belong, and so forth.
Sociologist Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929) suggested that groups can broadly be divided
into two categories: primary groups and secondary groups (Cooley 1909). According to Cooley,
primary groups play the most critical role in our lives. The primary group is usually fairly small
and is made up of individuals who generally engage face-to-face in long-term emotional ways.
This group serves emotional needs: expressive functions rather than pragmatic ones. Secondary
groups are often larger and impersonal. They may also be task-focused and time-limited. In fact,
people can move from one group to another.
Though with these two groups there are advantages which in Primary group shapes personality
of individuals. It plays a very important role in molding, shaping and developing the personality
of an individual. Because individual first come in contact with primary group. Individual is
socialized in a primary group. A child learns social norms, standards, beliefs, morals, values,
sacrifice, co-operation, sympathy and culture, meanwhile secondary group increases efficiency
of its members. To fulfill their self interest and specific goals all the members work efficiently. A
clear cut division of labor is found among the members. Disadvantage being in a secondary
group is that interact less on a personal level than in a primary group, and their relationships are
generally temporary rather than long lasting, whilst another of the disadvantages of belonging to
a primary group is that the simple fact of being part of one exposes us more to group pressure ,
given that the rest of its members share certain characteristics with us and through this
identification initiatives can be legitimized to create uniformity between individuals.
Functionalists believe that society is held together by social consensus, in which members of the
society agree upon, and work together to achieve, what is best for society as a whole.
Interactionism. ... Interactionists believe that these meanings are derived through social
interaction and that these meanings are managed and transformed through an interpretive process
that people use to make sense of, and handle, the objects that constitute their social worlds.
Social groups play a vital important role in the development of a person as a group which society
is built and sophisticated around, lack of this however creates a feral child; a human child who
has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, and has no experience of human
care, loving or social behavior, and, crucially, of human language. Feral children are evidence to
this as they show that without the appropriate human socialisation they often do not develop
understanding of language , emotions , a sense of right and wrong or the norms of human society
such as getting dressed ect. Feral children are important in the aspect that they give sociologists
and researchers an idea on what factors of a human’s behaviour is due to nature ( the biological
explanation- behaviour caused by factors in genetics ) or nurture ( the explanation that behaviour
is learnt).
To conclude that without social groups life is impossible it is proven that without social
interaction or social groups such as primary and secondary, development and lack of exposure to
social life ultimately defosters the growth of individuals. This gratification provided from this
essay goes to show that functionalist and interactionist both take q view to the study of social
groups with the structural differences in place.