Cooperative and Clashing Interests in Small Groups. Part I. Theory

Exploitation is as old as our knowledge of society and recurs continually in almost every social organization that we know, while cooperation is less common, more private, and continually breaking down. The authors are interested in routes that small groups discover for running against this exploitative current of history. The ordinary danger in new small groups is that divergent interests will be neither recognized nor balanced. Members will have contradictory plans for the use of the group situation, often unconscious, which are managed by ignoring or negating one or both parties. The authors have found, however, that groups are also capable of unconcious collective planning to handle these collisions. They describe five major principles of unconscious group planning, illustrate these principles in the narratives of two contrasting small groups, and compare this new theory with the classical perspectives on small-group dynamics.