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Interactive Summary | Vitae | Political Communication and Deliberation | Deliberative Democracy Handbook | Democracy in Small Groups | By Popular Demand
The Group in Society
Order review copies and reserve copies through Sage Publications.
The Group in Society will provide readers with an engaging synthesis of the most important theory and research on small groups. It is also designed to advance the development of small group research as a vital, cross-disciplinary enterprise. The Group in Society stretches across the lifespan from the family unit through the educational and work groups that fill our lives to the support groups that help us through personal difficulties to the civic, community, and religious groups that give our lives special meaning.
The book weaves diverse cases and research into a comprehensive embedded system framework, which stresses the ways in which society shapes groups and groups, in turn, reshape society. It is designed to be used for undergraduate courses, graduate seminars, or anyone interesting in understanding the groups in their personal, professional, and public lives.
Read an excerpt from
the copy-edited manuscript, including the table of contents,
preface, chapters 1-2, and references.
Early praise for The Group in Society:
"Small
groups are stubbornly interdisciplinary; its blessing
and curse. Groups remain endlessly fascinating and attract attention
from as
wide a set of disciplines as any single subject out there.
But
this interdisciplinarity also creates
fractures that, at worst, paralyze advances in the field.
The
conventional wisdom has been to create a
unified theory—identifying the same member roles, stages of
development, and elements
of cohesion—that applies equally to all groups regardless of
their function and
environmental context.
