Groups, Networks, and Social Structures

Social Groups

  • Collection of people who have ongoing social interactions, sense of belonging, and shared identity

  • They are the basic units of social life through which culture is created, transmitted, and reshaped

  • Examples: families, a sports team, friend cycle, a classroom, ethnic and racial groups

Simmel: political relations within a triad (3 people relationship)

  • Mediator: the mediator attempts to resolve conflict between the other two members of the triad and sometimes joins the group for that explicit purpose

  • Tertius Gaudens: Latin for “the third that rejoices”. This individual profits from the disagreement of the other two actors, essentially playing the opposite role from the mediator

  • Divide et impera: Latin for “divide and conquer”. This person intentionally drives a wedge between the other two parties

From groups to networks

Social Networks

  • Social networks = patterns of connections among individuals and groups

  • Tie: the connection between two people in a relationship that varies in strength from one relationship to the next

  • Networks reveal structural positions: Centrality, weak vs. strong toes, bridging ties.

  • They show how opportunities and constraints flow (e.g., information, resources, disease etc.).

Social Capital

  • Social capital: the information, knowledge or people or things, and connections that help individuals enter, gain power in, or otherwise leverage social networks

  • Having many weak ties increases social capital

  • For individuals, weak ties may be most valuable; for communities, however, many dense, embedded ties are valuable

Embeddedness: The strength of weak ties

  • Embeddedness: the degree to which indirect ties (i.e., friends of friends) reinforce social relationships

  • Strength of weak ties: the notion that relatively weak ties often hold hidden value because they yield new information

Structural holes

  • Structural hole: a gap between network clusters, or even two individuals, if those individuals (or clusters) have complementary resources

Organizations as networks social groups

  • Organizations: social networks that consist of larger, goal-orientated social groups with bureaucratic rules and authority structures (schools, corporations, nonprofits)

  • They connect individuals to broader institutions

  • Organizations are nodes that reproduce institutionalized patterns (e.g., education systems reproducing stratification, firms reproducing capitalist structures)

From groups and networks to social structures

Social structure

  • Groups, networks, and organizations connected to micro-level interactions with meso and macro-level institutions

  • Social structure = the patterned, enduring arrangements of roles, groups, networks, and institutions that organize society

  • it proves both constraints (limit on choice, inequality) and enablers (pathways, opportunities)

Analytical Connections

  • groups: where norms, identities, and solidarity form

  • Networks: show how relationships extent beyond single groups and how individuals are embedded in broader structures

  • Organizations: institutionalize and formalize roles, often scaling up group dynamics

  • Social structure: the overarching pattern that emerges from and shapes all three, giving society its stability, order, and inequality