講集團の社會的性格

Abstract

One of the most common social groups in our rural and urban communities has been the group called kō, such as Isekō, Tanomoshikō, Himachikō, etc. In accordance with the group theory of MacIver, kō may be regarded as a sort of "association" which has many social functions, such as religious, economic, recreational, etc. The aim of this paper is to clarify the social character of these kō associations from the viewpoint of sociological group theory. A certain aspect of their social character may be grasped by analysing the existing forms of association in their relationship to the communities which form their social substrata. From such a viewpoint, kō may be divided into the following three types: 1) One in which the extent of a kō's membership is identical with that of the area occupied by the community. 2) One in which a kō's membership covers a wider area than that of the community. 3) One in which a kō is a subgroup within the community. Corresponding to these three types, the following three points may serve as a frame of reference determining explicitly the correlation between the ko and the social unity of the community in which it exists: 1) A kō association whose extent is identical with that of the community may have a tendency to maintain or promote the social unity of the community. 2) A kō association whose extent is larger than that of the community is likely to weaken the community cohesion. 3) A kō association which forms a subgroup within the community may be able either to promote or weaken its social unity, but it may also have the function of preserving the given structure of the social system of the community. The writer has examined and verified these three theoretical hypotheses by the results obtained from his own field survey recently undertaken in certain rural communities of the Hokuriku districts along the Japan Sea coast of the central Honshu.