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Guest Editors' Introduction: Group Process as Social Microcosm

We began the process of editing for this special issue with a call for papers that was distributed to members of the discipline both broadly and narrowly. The notice appeared in the American Sociological Association newsletter, footnotes, and we distributed notices to individuals we knew worked in this area. We hoped that we would receive contributions from leading scholars in the field of group processes as well as from people who were employing groups as social settings for the investigation of problems that represented new or unique applications. Then we waited for responses to our call. When we were "up," we speculated about the papers that would fulfill our hopes; when we were "down," we contemplated the chance that we would not receive any. But our hopes were abundantly realized. This issue contains papers from eminent scholars in the field of group processes and from newcomers. The papers address classic concerns of sociologists in the study of interaction. They identify new applications of established analytic techniques that lead to new insights. The authors examine applications to new settings and tasks that suggest exciting new opportunities for the systematic study of interaction in small, bounded groups of social actors. We are pleased to present this issue to our readers. A long-standing concern for sociologists who study group processes has been the question of how work on small collections of social actors can be tied to concerns of the discipline that focus on larger questions of how societies emerge, maintain themselves, and change. These concerns focus on issues of culture creation, the distribution of scarce resources, and the ways in which goods are traded to symbolize solidarity. The papers by David G. Wagner and David R. Schaefer address these broad concerns in two very different ways. Wagner explicitly develops the links between the expectation states research program and its intellectual progenitors in the symbolic interaction tradition. This discussion of how relational social inequality and the symbols employed to establish and enact it in face-to-face settings make explicit the intellectual ties between the abstract expectations research tradition and the concretized tradition of symbolic interactionism. Schaefer develops simulations to explore how characterization of the symbolic quality of exchange resources affects their flow in social networks. We found this work intriguing, as it raises questions about the social value of rewards that are incommensurable. This is a research question that has been an issue for exchange theory since it was first developed by Homans, Emerson, and Blau 40 years ago. This paper offers some exciting ways to conceptualize and analyze the problem. Another issue often faced by sociologists who study group processes is the methodology typically used by these researchers. The isolation of one aspect of group activity logically lends itself to the experimental method; there has been a very long tradition of this practice starting with notable early studies by Asch, Sherif, and Lewin. However, critics have often panned laboratory work as not representative of "real world" social encounters. In his classic piece about abstract tests of social psychological processes in natural settings, Zelditch (1969) argues that one can study and should build theories regarding these group activities within the experimental setting.1 Still, the need to study groups in more naturalistic environments remains an important one for group processes specialists. To this end, in our volume we are pleased to include two groundbreaking studies of naturally occurring groups, one done by Lisa Trover, Gayle Watkins, and Steven D. Silver and the other by Alyson Whyte. Both of these studies use the classic nomothetic, top-down theory testing strategy. The former study involves tests of information exchange theory using data derived from interactions of construction work crews. …