Many of the early theories of groups use a "container" metaphor, likening groups to a bottle separated off from the environment. In fact, groups are not separate from the larger environment, and Linda Putnam and Cynthia Stohl started a line of thinking called the bona fide group perspective as a response to this critique. A bona fide group is a naturally occurring group. In this sense, all groups, unless they are artificially created in a laboratory, are bona fide, because all groups are part of a larger system. Instead of thinking of a bona fide group as a type of group, think of it as a perspective—a way of looking at all groups.
This perspective has been used to study groups such as juries, surgical teams, management groups, fund-raising committees, and teen-support groups. It attempts to explain multiple contextual aspects including external, historical, technological, and temporal features. Thus, while it is a good example of explaining temporal stability, it also includes other contextual elements as well.
Bona fide groups have two characteristics: they have permeable boundaries, and they are interdependent with the environment or context. Permeable boundaries mean that what is defined as "in" the group or "out" of the group is sometimes vague, always fluid, and frequently changing. At the same time, you cannot have a group without some sense of demarcation, meaning that the group does recognize a dividing line in relation to an environment, but it is a boundary that is always being negotiated. Further, group membership changes with people coming and going temporarily (e.g., illness) or permanently (e.g., quitting a job). Therefore, groups need to socialize new members and adapt to changes in this membership.
The permeability of a group's boundaries is obvious when you consider that members are always part of other groups as well. They bring into a group roles and characteristics established in other groups; you cannot separate group members from the other groups to which they belong. Sometimes, the varying group roles conflict, and members must resolve differences between what they are supposed to do in one group versus what is expected of them in other groups. You might have had the experience of being part of a hiring committee in an organization. This committee had discussions that were confidential, but you were a member of other groups as well—groups curious about what happened in meetings of the hiring committee. In this situation, you encountered the need to manage the curiosity of other groups against the confidentiality requirements of the hiring group.
Further, as a group member you rarely represent only yourself. Instead, you have other people's interests at stake. Outside interests will influence what you do and say within the group. If you are elected to a student council or to a neighborhood association, for example, you are always aware of the larger interests involved. Also, group members change, so that someone who was outside the group at one time becomes a member at another time and vice versa. Because of multiple group memberships, you may not be equally committed to every group, and not all members of a group show the same amount of loyalty or sense of belonging to a group.
From a bona fide group perspective, the group always is interdependent with its environment. In other words, the environment influences it, and the group, in turn, affects the relevant contexts in which it works. The environment is a system of interacting groups. Groups communicate with one another; they coordinate their actions; they negotiate which group is responsible for what; and they interpret the meaning of intergroup relationships. The point of contact or overlap between two or more groups is a nexus; it is in the nexus that interdependence is evident.
Among its many functions—such as accomplishing tasks and resolving internal conflicts—a group also must adjust and adapt to the situation or context in which it is working. The group must relate its work to an ongoing history of accomplishment within the larger system and to larger institutional opportunities and constraints. There may be moments when the group feels that it is "in transition," when it is not clear just how it does relate to its history or the institutions of which it is a part. These moments, referred to as liminality, create feelings of being in a suspended state. At these moments, groups work to define themselves vis-à-vis other considerations.
For example, a few years ago, our building at the university was remodeled. During the period of the remodel, faculty and graduate students were essentially "sent home" at the end of the spring semester, to exist in "virtual" space until the project was finished. It was interesting to see how this rather cohesive group of staff, faculty, and students managed this state of liminality and how the group worked to preserve a sense of "groupness" when there was no building to facilitate regular interaction. Both grad students and faculty hosted social gatherings of various kinds—brunches, weekly lunches, shopping trips, and the like—to ensure that the group did not lose its center.
Gaming methodology offers an opportunity to see the interdependence of bona fide groups. Gaming methodology is a planning tool in which "players" from stakeholder groups are brought together for several days to simulate an environment in which they must work with other groups to plan a future of mutual concern. The players—usually professionals—are assigned to stakeholder groups to engage in strategic planning around an issue like health care, homeland security, technology, or water quality.
Although they begin their planning in isolated stakeholder groups, the players in such games quickly learn that they cannot go very far without thinking about the larger system of groups of which they are a part. This realization occurs in a moment of liminality in which they must think about their role in the larger system, talk about how they want to relate to this larger context, determine the specific other groups with which they want to interact, and decide what they hope to accomplish by doing so.
After a short team-planning period, players leave their team areas and begin to interact with individuals from other stakeholder teams, forging agreements, sharing information, establishing partnerships and alliances, and creating plans larger than any one stakeholder group could do by itself. Sometimes teams compete with one another, sometimes they collaborate, and at other times they complement one another. Each of these points of contact in the game is a nexus of opportunity, and it is always fascinating to watch the play unfold in these ways.
The bona fide group perspective is a theory that has stimulated a considerable amount of research. An example of this perspective was a study that examined two collaborative relationships in the engineering research sector. Collaboratives are temporary cooperative ventures between multiple organizations to respond to rapid technological and economic change and to ensure the organizations remain competitive. Kasey Walker and Cynthia Stohl investigated the task communication and resource dependency networks (among students, teachers, and researchers) across the lifespan of the collaboratives. These collaboratives were formed to facilitate the development of new research.
The authors found that the networks within the collaboratives experienced a high degree of volatility given their permeable boundaries. People tended to make and break connections with other people frequently. Further, these networks tend not to be hierarchical given their fast-paced work and short-term deadlines. The authors note that the study stands in contrast to mainstream studies of groups that suggest there will be consistency and hierarchy present in collaboratives. They argue that this demonstrates the importance of understanding the interdependence with context and permeable boundaries of the bona fide group perspective.
The next theory explores another element of bona fide groups— that of technology and virtuality.