Symbiosis and Socialization

A Frame of Reference for the Study of Society

Bibliographic Data

ID2200592
AuthorsRobert E Park (corresponding author)
Year1939
Volume45
Issue1
Pages1-25
Publication date1939-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Journal of Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-9602 • E-ISSN: 1537-5390
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/218206
OpenAlexW2067938052
LanguageEN
Citations received32

There are two fundamental types of interaction, namely, competition and communication, which are everywhere active in bringing into existence and maintaining the types of social order and organization characteristic of society. While these two principles operate everywhere in human society, they are by no means wholly or always absent in forms of association characteristic of the lower organisms. So-called plant and animal communities exist everywhere in which the different species live together in forms of association that may bedescribed as symbiotic rather than social. Animals, and particularly insects, exhibit forms of association that are fundamentally familial, and based less upon competition than upon instinct and communication. In human society competition is progressively limited, as social relations become stabilized, by tradition and custom by a moral order. In so far as the customary and moral order prevails over temporary impulses and interest of its individual members, society will be capable not only of concerted but consistent collective action. Social institutions are, in the first instance, effects of the efforts of societies to act collectively. Theso-called "group mind" is merely a body of traditions, understanding, sentiments, and ideologies accumulated through conversation and communication, which make for any social group, social intercourse, understanding, and collective action possible. Socialization is the process by which the individual finds, at its various levels of social organization-ecological, economic, political, and moral or cultural-his place and function in society. The process by which the immigrant is incorporated in any social and cultural order is the reverse of that by which an individual born into a society finds his place in it

Action (physics) · Biology · Collective action · Competition (biology) · Environmental ethics · Ideology · Instinct · Order (exchange) · Political science · Politics · Social order · Social organization · Social science · Socialization · Sociology · Community Health and Development · Ecology · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

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