What Structures Network Structure?

How Culture, Class, and Context Influence the Creation of Social Capital

Network Structure Social Capital

Access to social capital can have powerful effects on life chances (health, well-being, employment opportunities, creativity, new information, material security, etc.)

Social networks are important (in part) because of the role they play in social capital formation.

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x Network Structure Social Capital

Research Question

What are the factors that influence personal networks to form according to one structure or another?

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Review of Previous Work

• Bridging, and Contexts

• Variation in Social Networks Across Class, Culture, and Context.

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Strong and Weak Ties

According to Granovetter (1973) in “The Strength of Weak Ties”, no strong tie can be a bridge.

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The Risks of Redundant Ties

Which yellow node is most likely to experience upward mobility? Why?

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Context/Setting

Virtually all relationships grow out of interactions conducted in a particular setting.

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Expectation

Separated settings may make strong ties resistant to network redundancy, therefore:

Under conditions of separation between settings, it is possible for strong ties to function as bridges.

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Research Design

• Recruited female respondents between the ages of 25-55, from 6 occupational classes: Food Service, Cashier, Sales Clerk, Psychologist, Attorney, University Professor.

• Data collected: Open-Ended Interviews, along with Social Map Exercise.

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Social Map Exercise

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Selected Findings

• Settings were influential in how respondent’s ties were (and were not) maintained over time.

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Setting-Structured Interaction

“Gina doesn’t go outside her comfort zone ever. She can be really rude sometimes...I’m really good at integrating into other people’s groups but I don’t necessarily want to integrate—I don’t feel like I’m enough of an essential part of a group to the be the glue that keeps a group together...And there are people who are like that, who make the phone call and everyone comes. But I just go where the party’s at. And I make friends there and I’m fine, but I don’t make the party [come] together.” 13

Setting-Structured Interaction

This passive acceptance that interaction is fundamentally structured by settings left Ruth vulnerable to loss of social capital.

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Class culture vis-à-vis settings

To an average middle class person, there is nothing strange about asking a workmate to come over, or go to the mall or a weekend lunch. Middle class friends recognize “that potentially their interaction could occur in any number of situations" (Allan 1977:390)

In contrast, for the working class, it does not necessarily follow that enjoying a person's company in a specific context would mean you should begin to integrate the person into other settings of your life (Allan 1977).

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Material Resources vis-à-vis Settings

Access to material resources also shaped how respondents engaged with settings.

Lower-income respondents had more neighborhood friends and high school friends than did the higher income respondents.

Higher-income respondents had more work friends and university friends than the lower income respondents, even those lower-income respondents who had attended some college classes.

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Lack of resources can be a barrier to having friends that “stick”

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Lack of resources can be a barrier to having friends that “stick”R: The people that made it to my list are people I’ve known since high school. The people in [name] college, they’re okay.

I: They didn’t stick the same way?

R: I didn’t have the same college experience people around me did, where they went to [beach 4 hours’ drive from the university] every weekend. One of my friends I remember coming back from Spring Break going, “I don’t know what I did, I think somebody slipped me something.” And I’m like, “You know, that couldn’t happen to me, because I worked,” [laughs] there’s no way I could—I wouldn’t be able to spend the weekend [there], doing all that.

I: Getting ‘roofied’.

R: That’s why I went through that wild phase after I graduated. Because I didn’t do it at all when I was at school. I was working. I paid my way. Those of us who did work, we worked on the weekends and at night, and whenever we weren’t in school we were working. I picture those people...Well, you get to know people that way because—when you get drunk with somebody at some bar, you get to know them. [laughs] When I was in high school I could be like that. Sure I had my summer jobs but it wasn’t like when I graduated and was in college.

I: You had to be more serious [in college].

R: Right. 18

Ample resources can facilitate having friends that “stick”

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Ample resources can facilitate having friends that “stick”

R: For me, I have a lot of friends from college that I don’t talk to, but I know that if something happened to Chris or me, they would be there without any sort of question and vice-versa. We don’t have to know what each other had for lunch each day to know we had that.

I: Did you work in college?

R: Yes-- well, I interned part-time over the summers, but I didn’t get paid.

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Selected Findings

• A periodic friend is a person with whom the original context has been lost, but the relationship endures, every now and then, with high relationship commitment but low contact frequency.

• The existence of these friends challenges our understanding of strong/weak ties.

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Summary

Cultural templates surrounding the practice of friendship may affect one’s ability to acquire--or one’s risk of losing-- social capital.

Material resources can impact the how robustly people are able to socialize within a setting.

There are important voluntary relationships that are high-commitment and low-contact. Frequently these arise when a relationship has outlived its original context. This challenges SNA’s prevalent assumption that contact and commitment are typically highly correlated. 22

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That’s it!