1NTERGROUP RELATIONSHIPS AND PROCESSES 411

favor of the over-all interests of the university, the president has failed
of his primary function, and the university will be torn by internal strife*

Representative government is an attempt to maintain on a quasi-institu-
tional level a vast over-all group of groups. In theory, and to some extent
in practice, a representative government is an agency for the coordina-
tion of all the constituent in-groups—economic, religious, class, ethnic,
etc.—of which the nation is composed,1 This it does, or tries to do, by
compromising the interests of each one, so that each gets at least part of
what it demands, or by canceling the demands of one against those of
another. Less formal but also somewhat institutionalized is the kind of
intergroup organization that exists among the various family units in any
fairly stable community. Here traditional sentiments and values of a
community order plus some degree of community coercion (social con-
trol) operate to subordinate the in-group interests of each individual
family to the larger community.

Intergroup organization is always tenuous, since the in-group has a
stronger claim upon its members than the intergroup organization has
upon its constituent groups. It is a fairly common historical experience
that under adversity even fairly traditional forms of intergroup organ-
ization disintegrate, and each of the several in-groups struggles inde-
pendently in its own behalf. Political demoralization, which is essentially
a fragmentation of a nation into its constituent elements—families, com-
munities, antagonistic economic interest groups, etc.—may occur when
the nation has been defeated in war or during times of revolution. When
a large business, governmental, educational, military, or religious organ-
ization suffers from adversity and inept leadership, the whole may be-
come demoralized; and the various constituent units—departments, bu-
reaus, companies, or whatever—may engage in internecine strife. The his-
torical trend in Western societies toward ever larger and less personal
forms of organization—secondary types of organization that presuppose
a decline in the integrity of antecedent organizations of the primary type
—has met with frequent temporary reversals as a consequence of the
tendency of intergroup organizations to break down under adversity into
their primary-group elements. Only to the extent that primary groups
have been so weakened that the members feel little in-group affiliation
does the secondary type of group acquire durability.

Intergroup Domnation and Subordination.—Distinct from intergroup
organization is the pattern of equilibrium that may exist when one of two
or more related groups has adjusted itself ("accommodated") to the other
or others by taking on and maintaining a subordinate role, much as a
small boy may assume a position of inferiority in the play of the neigh-

1 See S. Chase, Democracy under Pressure: Special Interests vs. the Public Welfare
(The Twentieth Century Fund, New York, 1944).