Social Processes

In one line

A social process is a recurring way in which people and groups act on one another, and every one of them either draws people together or pushes them apart.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: social processes are the repetitive and characteristic forms of interaction between individuals and groups which produce, maintain or alter social relationships. They are classified as associative or conjunctive processes, which bring people together and build social order, comprising cooperation, accommodation, assimilation, integration, tolerance and compromise; and dissociative or disjunctive processes, which separate and oppose, comprising competition, conflict, super-ordination and subordination, and isolation.

What makes something a social process

Four marks distinguish a process from a single event.

1. Interaction. Two or more parties acting with reference to one another.
2. Repetition and pattern. It recurs in a recognisable form, which is what allows it to be named and studied.
3. Continuity over time. A process has a course, unlike an incident.
4. A result. It produces, maintains, alters or destroys a relationship.

Park and Burgess are the standard authority for the classification, and they treated four as fundamental: competition, conflict, accommodation and assimilation. Later writers added the rest of MU's list.

The two families

The division is a convenience, not a moral judgment, and the strongest answers say why.

Dissociative processes are not bad. Competition allocates scarce positions and drives effort; conflict is how subordinated groups have obtained every improvement they have ever obtained, from [The Conflict Perspective]; and a society without either would be a society that could not change.

Associative processes are not always good. Assimilation may mean the disappearance of a minority's culture; accommodation may mean an unjust arrangement accepted because the alternative is worse; integration may be enforced.

And the same episode is usually both. Two firms competing are dissociative towards each other and intensely cooperative inside themselves; a war divides two nations and unites each of them as nothing else does. Georg Simmel's proposition is the one to cite: conflict with an out-group increases the cohesion of the in-group, which connects directly to [In-groups, Out-groups and Reference Groups].

The sequence they usually follow

The processes are not a random list; they succeed one another in a recognisable order, and showing that turns a list into an answer.

Competition, being impersonal and continuous, is the normal condition of a society with scarce resources. When competitors become aware of each other as opponents, competition becomes conflict, which is personal and directed. Conflict is costly and cannot continue indefinitely, so it is halted by accommodation, an arrangement under which the parties cease fighting without their differences being resolved. If the accommodation lasts, contact and interaction may over generations produce assimilation, in which the differences themselves disappear. Where assimilation does not occur, the outcome may instead be settled inequality, which is super-ordination and subordination, or withdrawal, which is isolation.