Abstract
The genesis of groups has been a part of sociology at least since Durkheim asked his famous question, “How do social groups form and how do they hold together?” and followed this with his equally famous dictum that social facts, like the existence of groups, can only be explained by other social facts. As a research site, however, social grouping, the creation and rise to prominence of new groups, or more generally “group formation” as the emergence of new social entities and categorizations, remains of marginal interest in comparison to the big four categorizations: class, race, gender, and sexuality. Unlike these, group formation is not a specialty in the sociological field. Unlike these, there are no job bank listings for sociologists of group formation. Unlike these, there are no journals, conferences, or ASA sections devoted to the phenomenon, although, as Katrin Sontag’s detailed study suggests, perhaps there should be.
