Week 5 · Chapter

Chapter 5 — Social Interaction, Groups & Organizations

Introduction to Sociology Free sample edition

The module's primary reading · ~35–45 minutes · Objective 4 (explain social interaction, groups, and organizations — status and role, dramaturgy, primary and secondary groups, conformity, and bureaucracy — and compare the functionalist, conflict, and interactionist explanations of deviance and social control, reading crime data as rates rather than counts), building on Objective 1 (apply the sociological imagination — connecting personal troubles to public issues — and the three major theoretical perspectives (structural functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism) to interpret a social phenomenon, naming the level of analysis each works at and placing the discipline's founders with the ideas and works they are known for) and Objective 2 (describe and evaluate the major sociological research methods (surveys, experiments, field research and ethnography, secondary-data analysis), distinguish reliability from validity and a population from a sample, and read a social statistic critically — what it measures, over what population and period, what it shows and does not, and whether it is a correlation or a cause) · Read it first this week; the lecture, the slide deck, the tutorial, the quiz, and the Sociology in Action Workshop all build on it.

In plain language

You act one way at a job interview, another way at a family dinner, and another way in a group chat with old friends. This week explains why. Every setting hands you a status (a position, such as employee or cousin) and a role (the behavior people expect from that position). You will see how groups pull your judgment toward theirs, and how the people you barely know can open doors your closest friends cannot. Finally, you will look at large organizations (groups built on purpose to reach a goal, like a hospital or a retail chain) and the rules that run them.

Why you already care about this

In 1951, Solomon Asch reported a study that still surprises people. Fifty participants each faced a group and answered a simple question about the length of lines. On certain rounds, everyone else in the room gave the same plainly wrong answer. Thirty-seven of the 50 went along with that wrong answer at least once.

You have probably felt that pull yourself. A study group agrees on an answer you are fairly sure is wrong, and you stay quiet. A new coworker copies how everyone else talks to customers before anyone explains why. A friend of a friend mentions a job opening that nobody in your inner circle had heard about. None of these moments feels like sociology. Each one is.

This chapter gives you names for those moments and the tools to read the studies behind them. You will see how people build a shared reality, how positions and scripts shape what you do, how a group can move a judgment, and how large organizations run on rules that can help and trap at once.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

explain the social construction of reality and apply the Thomas theorem to a case;
sort a person's statuses into ascribed, achieved, and master, and tell role conflict from role strain;
point out the front stage and the back stage in an everyday setting;
classify a group as primary or secondary, name an in-group, an out-group, and a reference group, and say what changes when a dyad becomes a triad;
read Asch's conformity results and Granovetter's weak-ties results four ways, with the arithmetic shown;
name the five traits of Weber's ideal type of bureaucracy and the four dimensions of McDonaldization, and run one organization through the three perspectives.

Carry this line with you: a role is a script, not a self — and you play many.

Where we are

Already covered: Week 1 gave you the three perspectives. Week 2 showed how to read a study four ways. Week 3 showed what a culture is made of, and Week 4 showed how you become a self.
This week: how people build a shared reality in interaction, the statuses and roles they play, the groups that hold them, and the organizations that run on rules.
How they connect: Week 4 built the self; this week follows that self into everyday encounters, groups, and workplaces, reading two real studies with Week 2's four questions.
Where we're going next: Week 6, Deviance, Crime & Social Control, asks what happens when people break the rules of the groups you meet here, and who decides what counts as breaking them.

Week 4 is the chapter this one leans on most. There, Cooley's looking-glass self showed that you form a sense of self by imagining how others see you, and Mead's generalized other showed that you learn society's broad expectations. This week asks what you do with that self once you walk into a room full of people. Week 3's norms, the shared rules for expected behavior, return as the scripts attached to every role. Week 2's four questions return in Sections 5 and 6: what is measured, over whom, what the figure shows and does not, and whether it is a correlation or a cause. And Week 1's levels of analysis matter all week: most of this chapter works at the micro level of face-to-face interaction until Section 7 zooms out to the macro level of whole organizations.

1. Build reality together: the social construction of reality

Walk onto the third floor of a campus library and you will hear almost nothing. No sign says "whisper only." Nobody hands you a rulebook at the stairs. Yet everyone lowers their voice, and a person who takes a loud phone call there gets stares. How did a quiet floor become quiet?

It started with people. Some students went to that floor to study in silence. Others followed their lead. Over a few years, whispering there became a habit, and then it became "what the third floor is." New students now treat the quiet as a fact about the building, not as something people made.

Sociologists start with the broadest name for what happens between people.

Social interaction is the ways people act toward and respond to one another, face to face or at a distance, guided by the meanings they share.

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann described the process behind the quiet floor in The Social Construction of Reality (1966).

The social construction of reality is the process, described by Berger and Luckmann in 1966, by which actions people repeat become habits and then come to feel like the natural, taken-for-granted way things are.

A shared definition can do more than feel real. It can change what happens next. W. I. Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas put that idea into one sentence in The Child in America (1928).

The Thomas theorem is the principle, from W. I. Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas in 1928, that when people define a situation as real, it becomes real in its consequences.

Worked example — the illustrative late-night bus route. Follow one rumor through an illustrative city.

The definition. A post spreads in a neighborhood group chat saying the late-night bus route is unsafe. No one checks it.
The behavior. Riders believe it, so many stop taking that bus after dark and pay for rides instead.
The consequence. The transit agency counts riders, sees the late-night bus nearly empty, and cuts the route for low ridership.
The result. Whether or not the route was ever unsafe, the definition produced a real outcome: no late-night bus.

In words: the riders' shared definition was real in its consequences, which is exactly what the Thomas theorem predicts.

Misconception check — "believing makes anything true." Students often read the Thomas theorem as "if you believe something, it becomes true." That is tempting, because the theorem sounds like positive thinking. But it says the consequences become real, not the belief itself. The bus route may never have been dangerous; what became real was the empty bus and the cut. The cure: ask "what did people do because of the definition?" That action is the consequence.

Memory hook: the rumor need not be true — the bus still stops running.

2. Name the positions and the scripts: status and role

Think about one person you know well, maybe a cousin. In a single day, that cousin might be a grandchild at breakfast, a cashier at a grocery store by noon, a student in an evening class, and a teammate in a weekend league. Each of those labels is a position, and each comes with expectations. A cashier is expected to count change. A teammate is expected to show up.

Sociology separates the position from the behavior attached to it.

A status is a recognized social position a person holds, such as student, sibling, or cashier, which carries expectations about how to act.
A role is the set of behaviors, duties, and privileges expected of someone who holds a particular status.

In short, you hold a status and you play a role. Statuses come in three kinds worth naming.

An ascribed status is a status a person is given at birth or receives later without choosing it, such as being someone's grandchild or reaching a certain age.
An achieved status is a status a person earns or chooses through their own effort or decisions, such as becoming a licensed electrician or a team captain.
A master status is the one status that dominates how others see and treat a person, coloring their reading of everything else about that person.

Holding many roles at once creates two different kinds of trouble, and a third experience comes when a role ends.

Role conflict is a clash between the expectations of two or more different roles a person holds at the same time, such as worker and parent.
Role strain is tension among competing demands inside a single role, such as a team captain who must both encourage teammates and decide who sits out.
Role exit is the process of leaving a role that was part of a person's identity and building a new sense of self afterward.

Worked example — one illustrative person, many positions. Take an illustrative night-shift nurse who is also a parent, a younger sibling, and a part-time student in an evening program.

Ascribed statuses. Younger sibling: nobody chooses their birth order. Their age is ascribed too.
Achieved statuses. Nurse, student, and parent: each came through effort or a decision.
Role conflict. The hospital schedules a shift on the evening of the child's school concert. The nurse role says "be at work"; the parent role says "be in the audience." Two different roles collide.
Role strain. Within the nurse role alone, the job asks for unhurried care at each bedside and also for checking on everyone on the floor before the shift ends. One role, two pulling demands.
Role exit. Years later, the nurse retires. People still ask about the hospital, and building a new answer to "what do you do?" takes time.

In words: a status is the position, a role is the script, conflict happens between roles, and strain happens inside one.

A master status needs its own example. Picture an illustrative local TV weather forecaster. At the grocery store, at a parent-teacher meeting, at a pickup basketball game, people greet them as "the weather person." That one status colors how strangers read everything else they do. A master status can be achieved, like that job, or ascribed, and it can be a position the person never wanted to lead with.

Misconception check — conflict versus strain. Students often swap role conflict and role strain, calling the nurse's concert problem "role strain." The words sound close, so the swap is natural. The cure is to count the roles. Two different roles in a clash is role conflict. One role pulling in two directions is role strain. The concert problem involves nurse and parent, so it is conflict.

Misconception check — "the status I like best." Students also read a master status as the status a person likes best or is proudest of. But the definition is about other people. A master status is the one that dominates how others see someone, whether or not that person would choose it.

Memory hook: hold a status; play a role.

3. Read everyday life as a performance: Goffman's dramaturgy

Watch a server at a busy restaurant. At the table, the server smiles, remembers the specials, and says "great choice" to every order. Then the kitchen door swings shut. Behind it, the same server sighs, eats a few fries from a tray, and jokes with the cooks about the table that sent back the soup.

Erving Goffman saw scenes like this as theater. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), he treated everyday interaction as a performance.

Dramaturgy is Goffman's approach, set out in 1959, that analyzes everyday interaction as a theater performance in which people present a self to an audience.
Impression management is the effort people make to control the impression others form of them through their appearance, words, and manner.
The front stage is, in Goffman's dramaturgy, any setting where a person performs for an audience and follows the expected script for a role.
The back stage is, in Goffman's dramaturgy, any setting hidden from the audience where a person can drop the performance, relax, and prepare.

Worked example — the illustrative restaurant and the video call. Sort each part of two scenes.

The dining room. The server performs for diners. The uniform, the menu, and the cheerful tone are props and lines. Front stage.
The kitchen. Diners cannot see it. The server vents, eats, and plans the next round of tables with the cooks. Back stage.
A video call for a job interview. The tidy bookshelf in the camera frame, the pressed shirt, and the careful answers are impression management. Front stage.
Off camera. The laundry pile beside the desk and the pajama pants below the frame are hidden from the interviewer. Back stage.

In words: the front stage is wherever an audience is watching your performance, and the back stage is wherever you can drop it.

Misconception check — the "fake" front stage. Students often think the front stage is fake and the back stage is the "real" self. That is tempting, because people relax back stage. But Goffman's point is that both are social. The kitchen has its own audience, the cooks, and its own expected manner. Back stage is not where the self stops being social; it is a different setting with a different audience.

Pause and choose one of these two prompts.

(a) Describe one front stage in your own week, such as a job, a class, or a team, and name one prop or line you use there.
(b) Describe one back stage in your own week and explain who is allowed in it and why.

Memory hook: front stage for the audience; back stage for the crew.

4. Sort the groups that hold you: primary, secondary, and more

Picture two groups you might belong to. One is the three friends you have known since middle school, who text you when your car breaks down. The other is a lecture hall of 200 people who share a course and little else. Both are groups, but they feel nothing alike.

Start with what makes any set of people a group.

A social group is two or more people who interact regularly and share a sense of belonging together.

Charles Horton Cooley named the first kind of group in Social Organization (1909). The contrasting term was added by later sociologists.

A primary group is a small group whose members share close, personal, face-to-face, and lasting relationships, such as a family or a circle of close friends.
A secondary group is a larger, more impersonal group organized around a shared task or goal, such as a work department or a class, whose members may know little about one another.

William Graham Sumner, in Folkways (1906), drew another line, between "we" and "they."

An in-group is a group a person identifies with and feels loyalty toward, the "we" of everyday talk.
An out-group is a group a person does not belong to and sees as the "they" set apart from their own group.
A reference group is any group people use as a yardstick to judge their own behavior, appearance, or achievements, whether or not they belong to it.

Georg Simmel noticed that adding a single person changes a group's shape.

A dyad is a group of two people, which ends if either member leaves.
A triad is a group of three people, which can survive one member leaving and can split two against one.

Worked example — sorting an illustrative person's groups. Take a first-year student who works at a hardware store and plays in an online game league.

The family who raised them. Close, personal, lasting. Primary group.
The hardware store's evening crew. Organized around a task: stocking shelves and serving customers. Secondary group, even though it has only six people.
The game league's team versus a rival team. The student's team is the in-group; the rival team is the out-group, the "they" in every trash-talk message.
Licensed electricians at the store's contractor counter. The student hopes to join that trade and compares their own skills to the electricians'. A reference group, though the student is not a member.
A lab partner in chemistry. A dyad. If either partner drops the course, the pair is gone.
Three roommates. A triad. One can move out and two remain a group, and a vote on chores can split two against one.

In words: depth and purpose sort primary from secondary, loyalty sorts in-group from out-group, comparison makes a reference group, and the count of two or three changes how a group can break.

Misconception check — sorting by size. Students often sort primary and secondary groups by size alone: small means primary, big means secondary. That is tempting, because primary groups tend to be small. But the criterion is the relationship's depth and purpose. The six-person evening crew is small and still secondary, because it exists for a task. The cure: ask "is this group about the people, or about the job?"

Memory hook: depth and purpose, not head count.

5. Read the pull of a group: Asch's conformity experiments

Back to the study from the start of the chapter. Solomon Asch wanted to know whether a group could move a person's answer about a plain fact, something anyone could see for themselves. He built a laboratory study where it could.

Four terms let you read it.

Conformity is going along with a group's behavior or judgment even when it differs from what a person would otherwise do or believe.
A confederate is a member of a research team who poses as an ordinary participant and follows a script the real participant does not know about.
A critical trial is a round in Asch's study on which the confederates all gave the same plainly wrong answer.
A pro-majority error is an answer in Asch's study that was identical with, or in the direction of, the majority's wrong answer.

Worked example — Asch's 1951 results, read four ways. The source is Asch (1951), "Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments."

What is measured? Whether a participant's answer about the length of lines, a plain perceptual fact, went along with a unanimous majority of confederates giving a plainly wrong answer on the critical trials.
Over whom? N = 50 participants in one laboratory study, reported by Asch in 1951. The result describes those participants in that setting.
What does it show? Work it one step at a time.
- Yielded at least once: 37 of 50 went along with the wrong majority at least once, so 37 ÷ 50 × 100 = 74%.
- Never yielded: 50 − 37 = 13 participants, and 13 ÷ 50 × 100 = 26%, about one-quarter, stayed completely independent.
- Answer by answer: about one-third (32%) of all critical-trial answers were pro-majority errors under a unanimous majority, so 100 − 32 = 68% of answers, about two-thirds, stayed correct.
- One ally: with one partner who answered correctly, pro-majority errors fell from 32% to 10.4% of answers, a drop of 32 − 10.4 = 21.6 percentage points.
- As a ratio: 32 ÷ 10.4 ≈ 3.1. So 32% versus 10.4% is about 3.1 times as many errors without an ally, and the ally cut them to about a third.
What does it not show? That most people always conform, or how any group outside that laboratory behaves.
Correlation or cause? An experiment. Control-group errors, recorded in writing with no majority present, were near zero, so the comparison points to the unanimous majority as the cause of the extra errors in that laboratory setting.

In words: a group can move a judgment about a plain fact, and one ally largely undoes it.

Notice the two different bases in that example. The 74% is a share of people: 37 of the 50 participants. The 32% is a share of answers: all the critical-trial answers given. Both are true at once. Most participants yielded at least once, and most answers were still correct.

Honesty note: the 32% comes from Asch's 1951 report. A later account of an extended series reports a slightly different share, which is why this course says "about one-third" and keys only on the 1951 figures. And 50 participants in one laboratory is a small, specific sample; it shows what a unanimous group can do, not what every group does.

Misconception check — "most people always conform." Students often summarize Asch as "most people always go along with the group." It is tempting, because 74% is a striking number. But 74% is the share who conformed at least once. About two-thirds of all critical-trial answers were still correct, and about one-quarter of participants never yielded at all. The cure: name the base. "Most participants conformed at least once; most answers were still correct."

Memory hook: one ally breaks the spell; a majority is not destiny.

6. Read the strength of weak ties: Granovetter's job-finders

Think about how people you know found their jobs. A cousin heard about an opening from a neighbor. A classmate got a referral from someone she met once at a volunteer cleanup. It often seems to be the people at the edge of your life, not the center, who mention the opening.

Mark Granovetter tested that hunch in "The Strength of Weak Ties" (1973). First, he defined what makes a tie strong or weak.

Tie strength is Granovetter's measure of a relationship, combining the time two people spend together, its emotional intensity, its intimacy, and the services they do for each other.
A strong tie is a relationship high in shared time, emotional intensity, intimacy, and mutual help, such as a close friend or a family member.
A weak tie is a relationship low in shared time, emotional intensity, intimacy, and mutual help, such as an acquaintance or a former coworker, that often links a person to new information.

The table below sets out the figures you will work with.

How often 54 job-finders saw the contact who led to their job, as percentages (Granovetter, 1973)
How often they saw the contact	Share of job-finders
Often	16.7%
Occasionally	55.6%
Rarely	27.8%

Worked example — Granovetter's 1973 results, read four ways. The source is Granovetter (1973), "The Strength of Weak Ties," American Journal of Sociology.

What is measured? How often each job-finder saw the contact who led to the job, at the time: often, occasionally, or rarely.
Over whom? N = 54 professional, technical, and managerial job changers who found their job through a contact, reported by Granovetter in 1973.
What does it show?
- The three figures: 16.7% often, 55.6% occasionally, 27.8% rarely. Added up, 16.7 + 55.6 + 27.8 = 100.1, because the source rounds each share to one decimal. Write them as the source does and never "correct" the sum.
- Weak ties combined: 55.6 + 27.8 = 83.4%, more than four in five, found the job through someone they saw occasionally or rarely.
- Versus strong ties: 83.4 ÷ 16.7 ≈ 5.0, so the occasional-or-rare route was about five times as common as the often-seen route.
- As people: 55.6% of 54 is 54 × 55.6 ÷ 100 ≈ 30, so about 30 of the 54 job-finders used a contact they saw occasionally.
What does it not show? That weak ties are "better" ties, that close friends do not help, or how job-finders in other kinds of work found jobs.
Correlation or cause? Neither. It is a description of which contacts these job-finders used, not a test of what a weak tie does.

In words: among these job-finders, acquaintances outnumbered close friends as the route to a job. Granovetter's reading is that weak ties reach information your strong ties do not already share; the survey describes the pattern and does not test that reason.

Why would that be? Your close friends tend to know the same people and hear the same news you do. An acquaintance moves in a different circle, so they are more likely to hear something you have not.

In practice (your tools). You can check the arithmetic in any free spreadsheet. Type 16.7, 55.6, and 27.8 into cells B2, B3, and B4. In B5, type =SUM(B2:B4) and you will see 100.1, the source's rounding. In B6, type =B3+B4 to get 83.4, the occasional-or-rare share. In B7, type =B6/B2 and format it to one decimal to see about 5.0, the "five times" comparison.

Caveat: 54 people in professional, technical, and managerial jobs is one slice of the labor market at one time. The finding is a strong clue about how information travels through networks, not a law about every job search.

Misconception check — "weak means worse." Students often read "weak ties" as worse ties, relationships that matter less. It is tempting, because "weak" sounds like an insult. But Granovetter's point is that weak ties are different, not worse: they are bridges to information your close circle does not have. Strong ties still matter for support; weak ties matter for news.

Memory hook: strong ties for support; weak ties for news.

7. Read the organization: bureaucracy, oligarchy, and McDonaldization

Renew a driver's license at an illustrative county office. You take a numbered ticket. A screen calls your number to window 4, where one clerk checks your documents against a printed list. A different window takes your photo. When your old address does not match the system, the clerk says, "I'm not allowed to change that; you'll need to see a supervisor." Nobody there knows you, and nobody needs to.

That office is a formal organization, and it runs as a bureaucracy.

A formal organization is a large secondary group deliberately organized to reach specific goals efficiently, such as a hospital, a school district, or a retail chain.
A bureaucracy is a formal organization run through a hierarchy of offices, written rules, impersonal treatment, specialized jobs, and appointment by technical qualification.

Max Weber described bureaucracy as an ideal type. That phrase has a special meaning in sociology.

An ideal type is a model that pulls together the defining features of something so it can be studied and compared, not a description of any one real case and not a judgment that it is good.

Worked example — the illustrative license office against Weber's five traits. Check each trait.

Hierarchy of offices. Clerk, then supervisor, then office manager. The clerk sends the address problem up the ladder.
Written rules. The printed list of accepted documents decides the case, not the clerk's opinion.
Impersonality. A numbered ticket, not a name, sets the order. Everyone is handled the same way.
Specialization. One window checks documents; another takes photos.
Technical qualification. Clerks are hired for the job by a test of the skills it needs, not because they know the manager.

In words: the office matches all five traits of the classroom model, which is why it treats strangers fairly and also why it cannot bend for an unusual case.

That last point is the downside Weber saw. The iron cage is Weber's image of people trapped inside the rational, rule-bound systems they built to make life efficient. When your case does not fit any form, the rules that protect fairness are the same rules that stop anyone from helping you.

Two later sociologists carried the analysis further. Robert Michels, in Political Parties (1911), argued that even groups founded to share power tend to concentrate it.

The iron law of oligarchy is Michels's argument, in Political Parties (1911), that large organizations tend to drift toward rule by a small group of leaders.

Picture an illustrative tenants' association that starts with neighbors meeting in a living room, everyone voting on everything. As it grows to hundreds of members, a few officers set the meeting agenda, control the email list, and speak to the landlord. Nobody planned it, but a few now run it.

George Ritzer, in The McDonaldization of Society (1993), carried Weber's idea of rationalization into fast food and beyond.

McDonaldization is Ritzer's term, from 1993, for the spread of fast-food principles of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control into more and more areas of social life.

Worked example — McDonaldization at an illustrative coffee chain. Match each feature to a dimension.

Efficiency. A mobile-order shelf lets customers grab a drink without waiting in line.
Calculability. A screen above the counter times every order in seconds, and speed is what gets counted.
Predictability. The same drink tastes the same at every location.
Control. A machine dispenses the exact amount of milk, so the worker does not decide.

In words: the four dimensions make the chain fast and reliable, and they also take judgment away from the people who work there.

Now run one organization through all three perspectives. Take an illustrative campus help desk that answers technology problems by ticket.

Structural functionalism (macro): the help desk's written rules and specialized staff keep a large campus running, each part doing its job so thousands of problems get handled.
Conflict theory (macro): a few administrators write the ticket rules, and the students with the least time and the oldest laptops wait longest, so the rules can protect those at the top.
Symbolic interactionism (micro): a student and a staff member read the phrase "your ticket has been escalated" differently, one hearing progress and the other hearing "not my problem anymore."

In words: the first two lenses read the help desk at the macro level of the whole organization, and the third reads it at the micro level of one exchange at the counter.

Misconception check — "every office is a perfect bureaucracy." Students often treat Weber's five traits as a description of every real organization, or as praise. That is tempting, because the license office fits so well. But an ideal type is a classroom model: real organizations match it more or less, and the model says nothing about whether bureaucracy is good. The cure: use the five traits as a checklist for comparison, not as a verdict.

Memory hook: fair rules can still build a cage; read the costs too.

For more on this week's ideas, the module's Readings & Resources page links to short articles and videos.

Key terms

Social interaction — The ways people act toward and respond to one another, face to face or at a distance, guided by the meanings they share. (first used: 1. Build reality together: the social construction of reality)
Social construction of reality — The process, described by Berger and Luckmann in 1966, by which actions people repeat become habits and then come to feel like the natural, taken-for-granted way things are. (first used: 1. Build reality together: the social construction of reality)
Thomas theorem — The principle, from W. I. Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas in 1928, that when people define a situation as real, it becomes real in its consequences. (first used: 1. Build reality together: the social construction of reality)
Status — A recognized social position a person holds, such as student, sibling, or cashier, which carries expectations about how to act. (first used: 2. Name the positions and the scripts: status and role)
Role — The set of behaviors, duties, and privileges expected of someone who holds a particular status. (first used: 2. Name the positions and the scripts: status and role)
Ascribed status — A status a person is given at birth or receives later without choosing it, such as being someone's grandchild or reaching a certain age. (first used: 2. Name the positions and the scripts: status and role)
Achieved status — A status a person earns or chooses through their own effort or decisions, such as becoming a licensed electrician or a team captain. (first used: 2. Name the positions and the scripts: status and role)
Master status — The one status that dominates how others see and treat a person, coloring their reading of everything else about that person. (first used: 2. Name the positions and the scripts: status and role)
Role conflict — A clash between the expectations of two or more different roles a person holds at the same time, such as worker and parent. (first used: 2. Name the positions and the scripts: status and role)
Role strain — Tension among competing demands inside a single role, such as a team captain who must both encourage teammates and decide who sits out. (first used: 2. Name the positions and the scripts: status and role)
Role exit — The process of leaving a role that was part of a person's identity and building a new sense of self afterward. (first used: 2. Name the positions and the scripts: status and role)
Dramaturgy — Goffman's approach, set out in 1959, that analyzes everyday interaction as a theater performance in which people present a self to an audience. (first used: 3. Read everyday life as a performance: Goffman's dramaturgy)
Impression management — The effort people make to control the impression others form of them through their appearance, words, and manner. (first used: 3. Read everyday life as a performance: Goffman's dramaturgy)
Front stage — In Goffman's dramaturgy, any setting where a person performs for an audience and follows the expected script for a role. (first used: 3. Read everyday life as a performance: Goffman's dramaturgy)
Back stage — In Goffman's dramaturgy, any setting hidden from the audience where a person can drop the performance, relax, and prepare. (first used: 3. Read everyday life as a performance: Goffman's dramaturgy)
Social group — Two or more people who interact regularly and share a sense of belonging together. (first used: 4. Sort the groups that hold you: primary, secondary, and more)
Primary group — A small group whose members share close, personal, face-to-face, and lasting relationships, such as a family or a circle of close friends. (first used: 4. Sort the groups that hold you: primary, secondary, and more)
Secondary group — A larger, more impersonal group organized around a shared task or goal, such as a work department or a class, whose members may know little about one another. (first used: 4. Sort the groups that hold you: primary, secondary, and more)
In-group — A group a person identifies with and feels loyalty toward, the "we" of everyday talk. (first used: 4. Sort the groups that hold you: primary, secondary, and more)
Out-group — A group a person does not belong to and sees as the "they" set apart from their own group. (first used: 4. Sort the groups that hold you: primary, secondary, and more)
Reference group — Any group people use as a yardstick to judge their own behavior, appearance, or achievements, whether or not they belong to it. (first used: 4. Sort the groups that hold you: primary, secondary, and more)
Dyad — A group of two people, which ends if either member leaves. (first used: 4. Sort the groups that hold you: primary, secondary, and more)
Triad — A group of three people, which can survive one member leaving and can split two against one. (first used: 4. Sort the groups that hold you: primary, secondary, and more)
Conformity — Going along with a group's behavior or judgment even when it differs from what a person would otherwise do or believe. (first used: 5. Read the pull of a group: Asch's conformity experiments)
Confederate — A member of a research team who poses as an ordinary participant and follows a script the real participant does not know about. (first used: 5. Read the pull of a group: Asch's conformity experiments)
Critical trial — A round in Asch's study on which the confederates all gave the same plainly wrong answer. (first used: 5. Read the pull of a group: Asch's conformity experiments)
Pro-majority error — An answer in Asch's study that was identical with, or in the direction of, the majority's wrong answer. (first used: 5. Read the pull of a group: Asch's conformity experiments)
Tie strength — Granovetter's measure of a relationship, combining the time two people spend together, its emotional intensity, its intimacy, and the services they do for each other. (first used: 6. Read the strength of weak ties: Granovetter's job-finders)
Strong tie — A relationship high in shared time, emotional intensity, intimacy, and mutual help, such as a close friend or a family member. (first used: 6. Read the strength of weak ties: Granovetter's job-finders)
Weak tie — A relationship low in shared time, emotional intensity, intimacy, and mutual help, such as an acquaintance or a former coworker, that often links a person to new information. (first used: 6. Read the strength of weak ties: Granovetter's job-finders)
Formal organization — A large secondary group deliberately organized to reach specific goals efficiently, such as a hospital, a school district, or a retail chain. (first used: 7. Read the organization: bureaucracy, oligarchy, and McDonaldization)
Bureaucracy — A formal organization run through a hierarchy of offices, written rules, impersonal treatment, specialized jobs, and appointment by technical qualification. (first used: 7. Read the organization: bureaucracy, oligarchy, and McDonaldization)
Ideal type — A model that pulls together the defining features of something so it can be studied and compared, not a description of any one real case and not a judgment that it is good. (first used: 7. Read the organization: bureaucracy, oligarchy, and McDonaldization)
Iron cage — Weber's image of people trapped inside the rational, rule-bound systems they built to make life efficient. (first used: 7. Read the organization: bureaucracy, oligarchy, and McDonaldization)
Iron law of oligarchy — Michels's argument, in Political Parties (1911), that large organizations tend to drift toward rule by a small group of leaders. (first used: 7. Read the organization: bureaucracy, oligarchy, and McDonaldization)
McDonaldization — Ritzer's term, from 1993, for the spread of fast-food principles of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control into more and more areas of social life. (first used: 7. Read the organization: bureaucracy, oligarchy, and McDonaldization)

Summary

Repeated actions harden into "the way things are," and defined situations have real consequences.
A status is a position; a role is the script attached to it.
Role conflict is between roles; role strain is inside one role.
Front stage is performed for an audience; back stage drops the performance.
Depth and purpose, not size, sort primary from secondary groups.
Solomon Asch: 37 of 50 yielded at least once, yet most answers stayed correct, and one ally cut errors to about a third.
Granovetter: 83.4% of job-finders used a contact seen occasionally or rarely; weak ties carry news.
Weber's bureaucracy is an ideal type; the iron cage, the iron law of oligarchy, and McDonaldization name its costs.

Check your understanding

Work these before looking at the answers — they are ungraded, and the answers (with reasoning) are at the bottom of the page.

An illustrative bus mechanic is also a twin and a volunteer coach of a youth soccer team. Sort the three statuses into ascribed and achieved. Then decide: when the coach must both keep practices fun and cut players from the travel roster, is that role conflict or role strain?
In an illustrative neighborhood running club of 40 members, 24 found their current job through a contact. Of those 24, 18 saw the contact occasionally or rarely. What percent of the club found a job through a contact? What share of the contact-users used an occasional-or-rare contact, and how many times as common was that route as the often-seen route?
Three coworkers have carpooled every workday for six years and confide in one another about their families. Is the carpool a primary or a secondary group? If one of them moves away, what kind of group is left, and what changes?
An illustrative oil-change chain promises service in 15 minutes and offers the same list of services at every location. A screen tells each technician the next step, and a drive-in lane moves cars through with no wait for a parking spot. Match each feature to one of McDonaldization's four dimensions.

Answers (worked reasoning — read after attempting)

Being a twin is ascribed, because nobody chooses it. Bus mechanic and volunteer coach are achieved, because each came from training or a decision. Keeping practices fun and cutting players are two demands inside one role, the coach, so it is role strain. It would be role conflict only if two different roles collided, such as a repair shift that overlaps a game.
Contact-users: 24 ÷ 40 × 100 = 60% of the club. Occasional-or-rare share: 18 ÷ 24 × 100 = 75% of the contact-users. Often-seen: 24 − 18 = 6 people, and 6 ÷ 24 × 100 = 25%. Comparing the two routes, 75 ÷ 25 = 3, so the occasional-or-rare route was three times as common. This is a description of one illustrative club, not evidence of a cause.
A primary group. It is small, but the deciding factor is depth: six years of daily contact and personal confiding make the relationships close and lasting. If one person leaves, a dyad is left. The group survives, as Simmel noted a triad can, but now it ends if either remaining member leaves, and there is no longer a third person to split two against one.
The 15-minute promise is calculability, because it counts time. The same services everywhere is predictability. The screen that tells each technician the next step is control, because it takes the decision away from the worker. The drive-in lane is efficiency, because it moves each car through with the fewest steps.

Next up in this module: the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, the quiz, the discussion, and the assignment — and next week Merton's strain model asks who decides what counts as breaking the rules.

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