Social Processes

Park and Burgess's cycle is the classic statement of this for groups meeting one another: contact, competition, conflict, accommodation, assimilation. It should be given with its criticism: the cycle is not inevitable, it can stop at any stage or reverse, and many groups remain in accommodation indefinitely without assimilating, which is what a plural society such as India's actually looks like.

A worked example

A group of families migrates from one state to another for work in a Mumbai suburb.

Competition appears first and is impersonal: they compete for housing, work and school places with everyone else, and against nobody in particular.

Conflict appears when the competition is personalised: a dispute over a hawking space becomes a dispute between two identified groups, and the language of "them" enters.

Accommodation follows, because the fighting is expensive for both: an understanding about pitches and timings, brokered by a local association or a corporator. Nobody's view of the other has changed. This is the stage most such situations remain in permanently, and recognising that is the mark of a good answer.

Assimilation is the slow possibility: the second generation goes to school locally, speaks the local language, marries locally, and after two generations the difference has stopped being a social fact.

Isolation is the other possibility: the group settles in one locality, works among its own, and interacts with the wider society only through work.

Super-ordination and subordination may be the outcome instead: the arrangement settles with one group permanently in the better position, and both come to treat that as normal.

Quick revision

1. A social process is a recurring pattern of interaction that produces, maintains or alters relationships. Marks: interaction, repetition, continuity, a result.
2. Associative: cooperation, accommodation, assimilation, tolerance, compromise, integration. Dissociative: competition, conflict, super-ordination and subordination, isolation.
3. Park and Burgess: four fundamental processes, competition, conflict, accommodation, assimilation.
4. The division is not a moral judgment. Competition and conflict produce change and are how subordinated groups improve their position; assimilation can mean a minority's disappearance.
5. Simmel: conflict with an out-group increases in-group cohesion, so the same episode is dissociative and associative at once.
6. The usual sequence: competition becomes conflict when personalised; conflict is halted by accommodation; accommodation may over generations become assimilation, or settle into subordination or isolation.
7. Park and Burgess's cycle: contact, competition, conflict, accommodation, assimilation. Not inevitable; it may stop or reverse, and permanent accommodation is what a plural society looks like.

Test yourself

1. Define a social process and give its characteristics. A recurring and characteristic form of interaction between individuals or groups which produces, maintains or alters social relationships. Its marks are interaction between two or more parties acting with reference to one another; repetition in a recognisable pattern, which is what allows it to be named and studied; continuity over time, so that it has a course rather than being an incident; and a result, in the shape of a relationship created, sustained, changed or destroyed.

2. Classify the social processes and name those in each class. Associative or conjunctive processes draw people together and build social order: cooperation, accommodation, assimilation, tolerance, compromise and integration. Dissociative or disjunctive processes separate, oppose or rank: competition, conflict, super-ordination and subordination, and isolation. Park and Burgess treated competition, conflict, accommodation and assimilation as the four fundamental processes.

3. Why is the associative and dissociative division not a moral one? Because dissociative processes perform necessary work: competition allocates scarce positions and stimulates effort, and conflict is the means by which subordinated groups have secured every improvement in their position, so a society without either could not change. Associative processes are correspondingly not always benign: assimilation may mean the extinction of a minority's culture, and accommodation may mean an unjust arrangement accepted because the alternative is worse.

4. State Simmel's proposition about conflict and cohesion. That conflict with an out-group increases the cohesion of the in-group. It follows that the same episode is dissociative and associative at once: two firms competing are opposed to each other and unusually united within themselves, and a war divides two nations while uniting each internally as nothing else does. It also explains why leaders in difficulty so often discover an external enemy.

5. Set out the usual sequence of the processes and its limitation. Competition, being impersonal, is the normal condition where resources are scarce; it becomes conflict when competitors identify each other as opponents; conflict, being costly, is halted by accommodation, an arrangement to stop fighting without resolving the difference; and sustained contact may eventually produce assimilation, in which the difference itself disappears. Park and Burgess stated this as a cycle of contact, competition, conflict, accommodation and assimilation. Its limitation is that the cycle is not inevitable: it may halt or reverse at any stage, and permanent accommodation without assimilation is the normal condition of a plural society.