n. This conception had its origin among the immigrants
themselves, and has been formulated and interpreted by persons who are,
like residents in social settlements, in close contact with them. This
recognition of the diversity in the elements entering into the cultural
process is not, of course, inconsistent with the expectation of an
ultimate homogeneity of the product. It has called attention, at any
rate, to the fact that the process of assimilation is concerned with
differences quite as much as with likenesses.

2. The Sociology of Assimilation

Accommodation has been described as a process of adjustment, that is, an
organization of social relations and attitudes to prevent or to reduce
conflict, to control competition, and to maintain a basis of security in
the social order for persons and groups of divergent interests and types
to carry on together their varied life-activities. Accommodation in the
sense of the composition of conflict is invariably the goal of the
political process.

Assimilation is a process of interpenetration and fusion in which
persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of
other persons or groups, and, by sharing their experience and history,
are incorporated with them in a common cultural life. In so far as
assimilation denotes this sharing of tradition, this intimate
participation in common experiences, assimilation is central in the
historical and cultural processes.

This distinction between accommodation and assimilation, with reference
to their role in society, explains certain significant formal
differences between the two processes. An accommodation of a conflict,
or an accommodation to a new situation, may take place with rapidity.
The more intimate and subtle changes involved in assimilation are more
gradual. The changes that occur in accommodation are frequently not only
sudden but revolutionary, as in the mutation of attitudes in conversion.
The modifications of attitudes in the process of assimilation are not
only gradual, but moderate, even if they appear considerable in their
accumulation over a long period of time. If mutation is the symbol for
accommodation, growth is the metaphor for assimilation. In accommodation
the person or the group is generally, though not always, highly
conscious of the occasion, as in the peace treaty that ends the war, in
the arbitration of an industrial controversy, in the adjustment of the
person to the formal requirem