This document discusses social processes and classifies them into two broad categories: conjunctive and disjunctive processes. Conjunctive processes draw people together through cooperation, accommodation, and assimilation, reflecting virtues like justice and love. Disjunctive processes push people apart through conflict, contravention, and competition, reflecting vices like injustice and hatred. The document then provides more details on cooperation as a conjunctive social process, describing it as a reciprocal relation where two or more parties work together for common objectives, and discusses factors that can account for cooperation occurring.

1. Classification of Social
Processes

2. Social processes flow in two opposite directions. From this, two broad
categories arise:
1. Conjunctive processes are the patterns of related interaction
through which persons are drawn together and become more
integrated.
2. Disjunctive processes are those processes in which people are
pushed farther apart and show less solidarity.

3. • In some degree, the conjunctive processes are always expressive of the
social virtues of justice and love, while the disjunctive processes are
always expressive of the social vices of injustice and hatred. As used
here, virtues and vices are taken not as moral habits but as patterned
forms of social relations that include both external and conceptual
patterns of behavior.
• The disjunctive social process may be described as negative to the
extent that they reflect injustice and hostility among people, while the
conjunctive relations may be called positive in the sense that they
reflect mutual altruism and justice.

4. • The three conjunctive social processes are cooperation,
accommodation, and assimilation. Each of these is an identifiable form
of social relation in which the participating persons achieve an
objective considered beneficial or desirable to themselves. Conscious
motivations are an expression of the participants’ self-interest, but in
their actual operation, they must also be considered of benefit to the
total group or society. They help to perpetuate and maintain the society
as an ongoing concern.

5. • The three disjunctive or negative social processes are conflict,
contravention, and competition. They are also social relations because
they are ways of behaving in which two or more persons must
participate. While the two parties may not always participate equally
in the relationship, there is never a case in which one is active and the
other is completely passive. These processes are described to be
negative because the people involved in them attempt to prevent others
from attaining an objective which is considered desirable. They may
be considered dissociative because the participants are at odds with
each other rather than in harmony.

6. Cooperation
• Cooperation, as a social process, involves two or more parties joined
together in pursuit of common objectives. This is the most common form of
social relations. It is very essential and an indispensable requirement in
maintaining and sustaining any given group or society in general.
• It is a reciprocal relation. Hence, it cannot be one-sided. However, it is also
often true that one party in the cooperative relation may achieve more of the
desired goals than does the other party.
• Cooperation may be defined as a more specific aspect of human intercourse,
one having to do with mutual aid or alliance of persons or groups seeking a
common goal or reward. It is a kind of conjoint rather than opposing action.

7. • Cooperation is a social process that admits of kinds and degrees. It is
much more intensive and continuous in primary groups than in
secondary associations.
• The primary group assumes that its members will cooperate, while the
secondary association often has to encourage and promote cooperation
among its participants. The family appears to require and obtain more
cooperation than other major groups of a society.

8. The factors that account for cooperation are complex and
numerous. Some of them are as follows:
1. Conscious desire for an object which may be reduced to self-interest
2. Loyalty to one’s group and its ideals
3. The fear of attack by an out-group
4. Basic structural need for mutual dependence
Cooperation may be viewed as social solidarity in action. Factors
attributing to this process are often described as social integration,
cohesion, and solidarity.

9. Types of Cooperation
1. Informal cooperation is characterized as spontaneous and involves
mutual give-and-take. This is commonly shown in primary groups of
gemeinschaft existing in the family, in the rural areas, and in very
simple societies.
2. Formal or organized cooperation is of deliberate and contractual
nature prescribing the specific reciprocal right and obligations of the
members. There are formal goals and objectives. Leadership is also
provided. This type of cooperation exists in large societies,
government, non-government agencies, and civic groups.