Текст 2. Конфликтология

1. Переведите и выучите следующие слова и словосочетания:

group dynamics, responsibility, leader, leadership, personal ability, the operation of social groups, conversation, a variety of statuses and roles, personal relationships, traditional cultural patterns, friendship, to produce consistent evidence, the particular needs of the group, to depend on, to recognize, research, to develop, development, to emerge, to involve

II. Прочитайте текст и переведите письменно абзацы 2, 3, 5, 6. Group Dynamics

1. Sociologists describe the operation of social groups as group dynamics. As members of social groups, people are likely to interact according to a number of distinctive patterns.

Group Leadership

2. Social groups vary in the extent to which they designate one or more members as leaders, with responsibility to direct the activities of all members. Some friendship groups grant no one the clear status of leader, while others do. Within families, parents generally share leadership responsibilities, although husband and wife sometimes disagree about who is really in charge. In many secondary groups, such as a business office, leadership is likely to involve an established status with clearly defined roles.

3. There are several different ways in which a person may become recognized as the leader of a social group. In the family, traditional cultural patterns confer leadership on the parents, though more often on the male as head of the household if two spouses are present. In other cases, such as friendship groups, one or more persons may gradually emerge as leaders, although there is no formal process of selection. In larger secondary groups, leaders are usually formally chosen through election or recruitment.

4. Although leaders are often thought to be people with unusual personal ability, decades of research have failed to produce consistent evidence that there is any category of «natural leaders». It seems that there is no set of personal qualities that all leaders have in common; rather, virtually any person may be recognized as a leader depending on the particular needs of the group.

The Importance of Group Size

1. Being the first person to arrive at a party affords the opportunity to observe a fascinating process in group dynamics. When fewer than about six people interact in one setting, a single conversation is usually maintained by everyone. But with the addition of more people, the discussion typically divides into two or more conversations. This example is a simple way of showing that size has important effects on the operation of social groups.

1. The basis for this dynamic lies in the mathematical connection between the number of people in a social group. Two people are joined in a single relationship; adding a third person results in three relationships, a fourth person yields six. As additional people are added one at a time - according to what mathematicians call an arithmetic increase the number of relationships increases very rapidly — in what is called a geometric increase. By the time six people have joined one conversation, there are fifteen different relationships among them, which explains why the conversation usually divides by this point.

2. Social groups with more than three members tend to be more stable because the lack of interest on the part of one or even several members does not directly threaten the group's existence. Furthermore, larger social groups tend to develop more formal social structure — with a variety of statuses and roles — which stabilize their operation. However, larger social groups inevitably lack the increase of personal relationships that are possible in the smallest groups.