Ferdinand Toennies Two contrasting forms of social life. The foundation of the Gemeinschaft or "community" is the Wesenville. Conceptualized at the societal.

Ferdinand Toennies

Two contrasting forms of social life. The foundation of the Gemeinschaft or "community" is the Wesenville. Conceptualized at the societal level, Gemeinschaft consists of social relationships of intimate or primary sort, of family, club, or religious order. Predictably, type of law that prevails in such an order will be that based on informal codes of family and kin, and social control will be left to consensus, custom, and religious precept.

Ferdinand Toennies

Wealth is centered in the land, individual is subordinate to collectivity, and central institutions are those of family, small village, and town. Remember that relationships, sentiments, and rules of Gemeinschaft are willed for their own sake. 

Gesellschaft

Given momentous changes of his era, Toennies acknowledged the ascension of the Gesellschaft. The creation of the rational will, "society," represents the more impersonal means-to-an-end forms of social relationships. These are marked by the purposes of exchange and reasoned calculation. At the group level, Gesellschaft relationships are exemplified in business or professional associations. At the societal level, the state and the economy of industrial capitalism supplant the centrality of the family, kin, and village.

Gesellschaft

Law is a matter of formal contracts, both civil and criminal, secured by legislation and specifying rights and responsibilities of individuals to individuals and members to commonwealth. Public opinion and conventional wisdom replaces heritage, articles of faith, and "natural" consensus as informal means of social control. 

Last of ‘Big Four’

Simmel: Group size

Sociologists interested in group size look at varying qualities of interaction based on size.

Georg Simmel introduced analytical categories for thinking about groups.

As group size increases . . . Intensity decreases Formal organization increases Stability and exclusivity increase

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Simmel: The Stranger

The stranger is being discussed here, not in the sense often touched upon in the past, as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the person who comes today and stays tomorrow. He is, so to speak, potential wanderer: although he has not moved on,he has not quite overcome the freedom of coming and going.

Simmel: The Stranger

He is fixed within a particular spatial group, or within a group whose boundaries are similar to spatial boundaries. But his position in this group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from beginning, that he imports qualities into it,which do not and cannot stem from group itself.

Simmel: The Stranger

The unity of nearness and remoteness involved in every human relation is organized, in the phenomenon of the stranger, briefly formulated by saying that in the relationship to him, distance means that he, who is close by, is far,and strangeness means that he, who also is far, is actually near.

Simmel: The Stranger

For, to be a stranger is naturally a very positive relation; it is a specific form of interaction. The inhabitants of Sirius are not really strangers to us, at least not in any social logically relevant sense: they do not exist for us at all; they are beyond far and near.

Robert Park: COMPETITION A PROCESS OF INTERACTION

Of the four great types of interaction--competition, conflict,accommodation, and assimilation--competition is elementary,universal and fundamental form. Social contact initiates interaction. But competition, strictly speaking, is interaction without social contact. If this seems, something of a paradox, it is because in human society competition is always complicated with other processes, that is to say, with conflict, assimilation,and accommodation.

Robert Park and Plant Simile It is only in the plant community that

we can observe process of competition in isolation, uncomplicated with other social processes. The members of a plant community live together in a relation of mutual interdependence which we call social probably because,while it is close and vital, it is not biological.

Robert Park and Plant Simile It is not biological because relation is a

merely external one and plants that compose it are not even of same species. They do not interbreed. The members of a plant community adapt themselves to one another as all living things adapt themselves to their environment, but there is no conflict between them because they are not conscious. Competition takes the form of conflict or rivalry only when it becomes conscious, when competitors identify one another as rivals or as enemies.

Competition and Control.. Conflict, assimilation and accommodation as

distinguished from competition are all related to control. Competition is process through which distributive and ecological organization of society is created. Competition determines distribution of population territorially and vocationally. The division of labor and all the vast organized economic interdependence of individuals and groups of individuals characteristic of modern life are a product of competition. On the other hand, moral and political order, which imposes itself upon competitive organization, is a product of conflict, accommodation and assimilation.

Competition and Conflict

It is only in periods of crisis, when men are making new and conscious efforts to control the conditions of their common life, that the forces with which they are competing get identified with persons, and competition is converted into conflict.

Accommodation, Assimilation, and Competition. Accommodation is the process by which

individuals and groups make necessary internal adjustments to social situations which have been created by competition and conflict. War and elections change situations.

When changes are decisive and are accepted, conflict subsides and the tensions it created are resolved in the process of accommodation into profound modifications of the competing units, i.e., individuals and groups.

Assimilation

Assimilation, as distinguished from accommodation, implies a more thoroughgoing transformation of the personality—transformation which takes place gradually under influence of social contacts of most concrete and intimate sort. Assimilation takes place not so much as a resultof changes in the organization as in the content, i.e., the memories,of the personality. The individual units, as a result of intimateassociation, interpenetrate, so to speak; and come in this wayinto possession of a common experience and a common tradition.

Parks Typology

SOCIAL PROCESS SOCIAL ORDER

Competition Conflict Accommodation Assimilation  

The economic equilibrium

The political order Social organization Personality and the

cultural heritage