Blackwell Reference Online

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Groups exist by virtue of there being out groups. For a collection of people to be a group there must, logically, be other people who are not in the group (a diffuse non-ingroup, e.g., academics vs. non-academics) or people who are in a specific outgroup (e.g., academics vs. politicians). In this sense, social groups are categories of people; and just like other categories, a social category acquires its meaning by contrast with other categories. The social world is patterned by social discontinuities that mark the boundaries of social groups in terms of perceived and/or actual differences in what people think, feel, and do. Clearly, any analysis of group behavior should, to some extent, rest upon an analysis of categories and of social categorization processes, and of the social relations between categories (intergroup relations). More explicitly, a full analysis of processes within groups invites an integration, or, to use Doise's (1986 ; Lorenzi-Cioldi & Doise, 1990 ) terminology, an “articulation,” of different levels of explanation – in this case, social categorization, interindividual interaction, and intergroup relations. Social psychologists have, however, tended to find such an integration problematic. The traditional area of group dynamics which was central to social psychology from the 1940s into the 1960s, largely focused on interpersonal interaction in small task-oriented ... log in or subscribe to read full text