The study of societies is concerned primarily with types of social organization and with attitudes and cultural elements embodied in them. The survey of communities deals essentially with social situations and the problems connected with them.
The study of social groups was a natural outgrowth of the study of the individual. In order to understand the person it is necessary to consider the group. Attention first turned to social institutions, then to conflict groups, and finally to crowds and crowd influences.
Social institutions were naturally the first groups to be studied with some degree of detachment. The work of ethnologists stimulated an interest in social origins. Evolution, though at first a purely biological conception, provoked inquiry into the historical development of social structure. Differences in institutions in contemporary societies led to comparative study. Critics of institutions, both iconoclasts without and reformers within, forced a consideration of their more fundamental aspects.
The first written accounts of conflict groups were quite naturally of the propagandist type both by their defenders and by their opponents. Histories of nationalities, for example, originated in the patriotic motive of national glorification. With the acceptance of objective standards of historical criticism the ground was prepared for the sociological study of nationalities as conflict groups. A school of European sociologists represented by Gumplowicz, Ratzenhofer, and Novicow stressed conflict as the characteristic behavior of social groups. Beginnings, as indicated in the bibliography, have been made of the study of various conflict groups as gangs, labor unions, parties, and sects.
The interest in the mechanism of the control of the individual by the group has been focused upon the study of the crowd. Tarde and Le Bon in France, Sighele in Italy, and Ross in the United States were the pioneers in the description and interpretation of the behavior of mobs and crowds. The crowd phenomena of the Great War have stimulated the production of several books upon crowds and crowd influences which are, in the main, but superficial and popular elaborations of the interpretations of Tarde and Le Bon. Concrete material upon group behavior has rapidly accumulated, but little or no progress has been made in its sociological explanation.
At present there are many signs of an increasing interest in the study of group behavior. Contemporary literature is featuring realistic descriptions. Sinclair Lewis in Main Street describes concretely the routine of town life with its outward monotony and its inner zest. Newspapers and magazines are making surveys of the buying habits of their readers as a basis for advertising. The federal department of agriculture in co-operation with schools of agriculture is making intensive studies of rural communities. Social workers are conscious that a more fundamental understanding of social groups is a necessary basis for case work and community organization. Surveys of institutions and communities are now being made under many auspices and from varied points of view. All this is having a fruitful reaction upon the sociological theory.
4. The Study of the Family
The family is the earliest, the most elementary, and the most permanent of social groups. It has been more completely studied, in all its various aspects, than other forms of human association. Methods of investigation of family life are typical of methods that may be employed in the description of other forms of society. For that reason more attention is given here to studies of family life than it is possible or desirable to give to other and more transient types of social groups.
The descriptions of travelers, of ethnologists and of historians made the first contributions to our knowledge of marriage, ceremonials, and family organization among primitive and historical peoples. Early students of these data devised theories of stages in the evolution of the family. An anthology might be made of the conceptions that students have formulated of the original form of the family, for example, the theory of the matriarchate by Bachofen, of group marriage growing out of earlier promiscuous relations by Morgan, of the polygynous family by Darwin, of pair marriage by Westermarck. An example of the ingenious, but discarded method of arranging all types of families observed in a series representing stages of the evolution is to be found in Morgan's Ancient Society. A survey of families among primitive peoples by Hobhouse, Ginsberg, and Wheeler makes the point that even family life is most varied upon the lower levels of culture, and that the historical development of the family with any people must be studied in relation to the physical and social environment.
The evolutionary theory of the family has, however, furnished a somewhat detached point of view for the criticism of the modern family. Social reformers have used the evolutionary theory as a formula to justify attacks upon the family as an institution and to support the most varied proposals for its reconstruction. Books like Ellen Key's Love and Marriage and Meisel-Hess, The Sexual Crisis are not scientific studies of the family but rather social political philippics directed against marriage and the family.