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5 - From Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back, Social Pressures in Informal Groups

from II - Early Foundations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2021

Mario L. Small
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Brea L. Perry
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
Bernice Pescosolido
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
Edward B. Smith
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Illinois
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Summary

Festinger, Schachter, and Back’s Social Pressures in Informal Groups (henceforward FSB’s SPIG) was one of the most exciting and theoretically generative works in what we now think of as the field of social networks, emerging from one of the focal arenas of Gestalt-psychology-inspired research. It established the importance of functional distance for relationship formation, and demonstrated that there were effects of variations on the scale of feet, not miles. It also used a clever research design to attempt to see if information spread along social networks. The clarity of FSB’s structuralist vision was to some degree clouded by the then-common reification of groups, and a tendency to focus on normative and functional goals to the exclusion of all else. Yet here were many of the seeds of the structural approach to social networks.

Type
Chapter
Information
Personal Networks
Classic Readings and New Directions in Egocentric Analysis
, pp. 135 - 150
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Festinger, Leon, Cartwright, Dorwin, Barber, Kathleen, Fleischl, Juliet, Gottsdanker, Josephine, Keysen, Annette, and Leavitt, Gloria. 1948. “The Study of a Rumor: Its Origin and Spread.Human Relations 1: 464–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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