Significance Of Social Group

by Valentino Piana (2004)

Social Groups

Contents


1. Significance


2. Social groups defined along income and non-income axes


3. Core vs. periphery


4. The boundaries of social groups


5. Self-consciousness of social groups


6. Formal models


7. Data





Throughout the world, societies are split into distinct, albeit sometimes overlapping, social groups.

While self-definition - and self-defined belonging to groups - widely varies over time and situations for even the same individual, there are several indicators and features along which the researcher can build clusters of people.

Indeed, the atomistic idea according to which everyone feels to be dissimilar from anybody else is a realistic picture only of very extreme social conditions. Networks of people linked by communication and emotional lines are very common, while their collapse into monistic units of disconnected individuals is more the result of crashes in the social texture than the standard state.

This is very important for economics since, for instance, social groups are important for consumption as visible behaviour can become a standard with which to compare your owns. Peer groups are often the reference for choosing whether a certain good is a "must have", engendering an imitation dynamics.

In this vein, another name for "social group" is "market segment", seen from the point of view of a seller or a mass medium, to which a differentiated product can be addressed.