Social Processes — Competition, Conflict, Accommodation, assimilation, tolerance, compromise, super-ordination and subordination, integration, isolation etc

Communal riots and peace accords are two outcomes of the same underlying social forces — groups interacting under conditions of scarcity, difference and competing interest. Sociology names each stage of that interaction precisely: competition, conflict, accommodation, assimilation. A lawyer negotiating a settlement or a policymaker drafting a communal-harmony measure is really managing these named social processes, whether or not they use the sociological vocabulary for it.

In two minutes

Social processes are the recurring ways individuals and groups interact with each other — competition, conflict, accommodation, assimilation, tolerance, compromise, integration and isolation among them — and they range from associative processes that draw people together to dissociative processes that push them apart.

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