Week 4 - September 16, 2007

Chapter 5: "Groups and Organization" are the vessels through which social interaction is transmitted. Social groups are the small clusters of people with whom we interact with in our daily lives, while organizations are corporations and bureacracies. Primary groups are small social groups who share personal relationships and secondary groups are ones formed to pursue a specific goal. There are two types of leadership, instrumental (focuses of task completion) and expressive (more interested in the group's well being) and three types of leadership styles, authoritarian, democratic, and laissez-faire. America faces many challenges in terms of organizations, 1) race and gender; 2) the Japanese work organization; and 3) the changing nature of the work. As we move from an industrialized to a post industrialized society we have created two types of work, highly skilled crative work and low-skilled service work.