Social groups

Not every gathering is a group.

• An aggregate is simply people in the same place at the same time with no definite connection: shoppers in a crowded market lane, people in a cinema hall, passengers on a platform.
• A quasi group is a collection or aggregate that lacks structure or organisation, and whose members may not even know the grouping exists. Over time, quasi groups can become social groups: for example, people sharing a social class or a gender may come together around a common cause or political movement.

A social group has:

• continuous interaction that gives it stability;
• a stable pattern of interactions;
• a sense of belonging and identity: a 'we' feeling;
• shared interests;
• acceptance of common norms and values;
• a definable structure.

Primary and secondary groups:

• Primary groups are small, with close, personal, face-to-face relationships, intimacy and cooperation, and they are person-oriented: the relationship itself matters. The family, the village, a circle of close friends. We learn our first values and norms here.
• Secondary groups are larger and more formal, with impersonal relationships, and they are goal-oriented: people are together to get something done. Schools, government offices, hospitals, students' associations.

Community and society (association):

• Community: relationships that are highly personal, intimate and enduring, where a person's involvement is significant, as in older, agrarian ways of life.
• Society or association: the modern, urban pattern of impersonal, superficial, short-term relationships, often based on calculation of what each side gains.

In-groups and out-groups. An in-group has a strong sense of belonging: its members think of themselves as 'us'. The out-group is 'them', sometimes seen with hostility or contempt. Pupils in a school cheering their own team in an inter-school match form an in-group against the visiting school.

• In 1948, while taking a census in Rampura, a village in Karnataka, M.N. Srinivas noticed villagers calling recent migrants, almost contemptuously, 'nenne monne bandavaru' ('came yesterday or the day before'), while old migrants were 'arsheyinda bandavaru' ('came long ago') or 'khadeem kulagalu' ('old lineages'). Even among people who were all migrants once, an in-group and out-group had formed.

Peer groups and reference groups:

• A peer group is a kind of primary group of people of similar age or in a common profession. Peer pressure is the social pressure peers put on what one ought or ought not to do. Teenagers often feel it most strongly, when home values and friends' values pull different ways.
• A reference group is a group whose lifestyle people look up to and want to copy. We are not members of our reference groups, and they may not even know we admire them. Under colonial rule, many middle-class Indians wanted to behave like the 'proper Englishman'. This was gendered: men often copied British dress and dining, but wanted the women of their family to remain 'Indian' in their ways.
• Example (new): students in a small town who copy the clothes, phones and slang of college students in a big city are using them as a reference group.