From local champions to global players: A long-term perspective on Swiss companies’ connections across territorial scales

Corporate interlocking at the national and transnational scale has received substantive scholarly attention. Less is known about companies’ ties to the cities and regions in which they have their seats. In this paper, we conduct a long-term analysis of the multilevel ties that companies maintain with the local and the national context they are embedded in. To do so, we adopt a positional approach and identify the directors of the major companies in the three largest Swiss cities (Basel, Geneva, and Zurich) and study company directors’ ties to local and national organizations in seven benchmark years between 1890 and 2020. Our analysis documents the rise and fall of company directors’ ties to national organizations over the course of the 20th century, and it highlights the continued persistence of companies’ ties to the local level and their region until the new millennium, when companies’ ties with national and local organizations vanish, coinciding with the transnationalization of company boards.     

Visiting migrants: An introduction

This paper offers an overview of the origins and dynamics of the concept of migrant visits and introduces the key contributions of the special issue. We highlight the significance of visits that criss-cross many forms of migration and centre on these visits’ bilateral and multilateral nature. Furthermore, we emphasize emotional, sensory and bodily implications, which almost always shape encounters between migrants and others in such visits. The papers of this special issue contribute to a broad interdisciplinary agenda highlighting familial ties, networks and transnational spaces at the core of migration and mobility scholarship. Together, we offer new perspectives on the multidirectionality of visits and the role of relationships which drive, connect and diversify forms of migration and are facilitated by broader developments in technology, tourism and diasporic practices.     

Migration,International Telecommunications,and Human Rights1

World polity embeddedness has traditionally been measured by state and civil participation in formal venues, including international organizations, multilateral agreements, and world conferences. In this study, we highlight an alternative form of embeddedness found in cross‐national social relations and apply this framework to the human rights sector of the world polity. Specifically, we propose that the international migrant community diffuses human rights values and practices via (1) local performance and (2) cross‐national communication. Using data from the World Values Survey, we first show that immigrants are more likely to embrace, and actively participate in, the human rights movement. Next, using network data that report country‐to‐country bilateral flows, we observe a high degree of correspondence between international migration and telecommunications, confirming previous studies that trace telephone traffic to the flow of people. Finally, analyzing a balanced data set of 333 observations across 111 countries spanning the 1975–2000 period, we use ordered probit regression to assess the local and cross‐national effects of migrants on a state’s human rights record. We find that a country’s immigration level and its in‐degree centrality in international telecommunications both positively affect its Amnesty International rating, and that these effects are robust to a number of alternative specifications.     

Double-embeddedness: Spatial and relational contexts of tie persistence and re-formation

Personal relationships are embedded in both spatial and relational contexts. Using data on 60 intentional communities from the Urban Communes Data Set, we examine how such embedding is related to the persistence and re-formation of close personal ties over a thirteen year period, beginning from when most members had been out of their group environments more than a decade. We find that local network structure—the pattern of dyads immediately surrounding any dyad—is extremely weighty in which ties persist, which lapse, and which are re-initiated, but that the precise ways in which local structure affects contact are bound up with the distance between dyad members. We also find asymmetries in these processes that other studies have been unable to uncover—that processes that lead ties to be dropped are not the same as those that lead them to be renewed; that increases in local embeddedness are not opposite of decreases; that change in contact is not the same as change in friendship. Finally, there is evidence of hierarchical effects influencing the retention of friendships more than twenty-five years after most respondents left their groups.     

Analysing networks of networks

We consider data with multiple observations or reports on a network in the case when these networks themselves are connected through some form of network ties. We could take the example of a cognitive social structure where there is another type of tie connecting the actors that provide the reports; or the study of interpersonal spillover effects from one cultural domain to another facilitated by the social ties. Another example is when the individual semantic structures are represented as semantic networks of a group of actors and connected through these actors’ social ties to constitute knowledge of a social group. How to jointly represent the two types of networks is not trivial as the layers and not the nodes of the layers of the reported networks are coupled through a network on the reports. We propose to transform the different multiple networks using line graphs, where actors are affiliated with ties represented as nodes, and represent the totality of the different types of ties as a multilevel network. This affords studying the associations between the social network and the reports as well as the alignment of the reports to a criterion graph. We illustrate how the procedure can be applied to studying the social construction of knowledge in local flood management groups. Here we use multilevel exponential random graph models but the representation also lends itself to stochastic actor-oriented models, multilevel blockmodels, and any model capable of handling multilevel networks.     

Losing Control: Policy Space to Prevent and Mitigate Financial Crises in Trade and Investment Agreements

This article examines the extent to which measures to mitigate the current financial crisis and prevent future crises are permissible under a variety of bilateral, regional and multilateral trade and investment agreements. US trade and investment agreements, and, to a lesser extent, the World Trade Organization, leave little room to manoeuvre with capital controls, despite increasing evidence that certain controls can prevent or mitigate crises. Investment rules under the treaties of most capital‐exporting nations allow for at least the use of temporary controls as a safeguard measure. The article offers a range of policies that could be deployed to improve US investment rules.     

Whom do we lose? The case of dissimilarity in personal networks

Previous research finds that individuals tend to form ties with similar others much more often than with dissimilar others. However, we know relatively little about tie loss and to what extent this is driven by (dis)similarity. In this paper, we argue that ties to persons who are dissimilar with regard to gender, age, ethnicity, and education are lost faster than ties to similar persons – and we test three explanations for this faster decay of ties with dissimilar others: lack of meeting opportunities, preferences for similarity, and lower network embeddedness. To test these explanations, we analysed two waves of the Survey on the Social Networks of the Dutch (SSND, 2007, 2014). These SSND-waves contain comprehensive longitudinal panel data on ego networks of 441 respondents, who were interviewed about a wide range of relationships, their alters’ sociodemographic characteristics, where and when they met their alters, as well as how and whether they maintain these relationships. We modelled tie loss by event history analyses. Results show that ties to persons who were dissimilar are more likely to be lost faster, and that tie loss occurs mostly in the early years of a relationship. However, meeting opportunities, preferences for similarity, and network embeddedness are unable to explain why ties to dissimilar others are lost faster. We conclude that dissimilarity is a powerful driver of tie loss, and that more arguments and research are needed to fully understand the underlying mechanisms.     

Experimental analysis of impatience in bilateral and multilateral negotiations

We conduct unstructured bilateral and multilateral negotiations in a laboratory experiment, to assess whether bargainers’ impatience affects outcomes as predicted by structured models meant to represent less-structured naturally-occurring settings. For concreteness we consider a buyer who can make only one trade negotiating with one or two sellers, with impatience induced via time pressure: a bargainer receives their negotiated payoff only if agreement is reached before expiration of a randomly determined bargainer-specific time limit that is unknown to all bargainers. We find increasing the buyer’s impatience generally harms the buyer, supporting the predictions from standard bilateral models and from some multilateral models.     

Funding Civil Society? Bilateral Government Support for Development NGOs

Research on the determinants of foreign aid tends to focus on the relationship between donor country priorities and recipient state characteristics, but donors also make decisions about which organizations and programs within countries will receive assistance. Although NGOs increasingly have been recipients of foreign aid, few data are available to investigate which organizations within a given country receive that funding. Donors may prioritize structural characteristics of NGOs or their local ties—or they may seek a combination that blends concern about efficiency and accountability with an interest in developing national civil society. We use original data from Cambodia to explore whether aid is likely to go to managerial organizations (professionalized NGOs and NGOs that utilize modern management tools) or to organizations that are embedded in the domestic context. We argue that managerialism provides legitimacy for NGOs by signaling capacity and accountability to donors, increasing the likelihood of government funding. We argue that local embeddedness also confers legitimacy by aligning community ties and networks to rights-based development, increasing the likelihood of government funding. We find general support for the managerialism argument, but donor agencies do not prioritize direct funding for “indigenous” NGOs—not even among those with high levels of managerialism.     

Economic embeddedness and materiality in a financial market setting

The notion of embeddedness (Granovetter, 1985) neglects of the material dimension of economic relations. This paper contributes to the literature of market devices (Callon et al., 2007) with an exploration of the material dimensions of economic embeddedness in the case of the everyday market activities of a group of non‐professional investors in the UK. It examines the attributes of a materially embedded market through the categories of socio‐economic embeddedness specified by Uzzi (1997) and draws attention to the superficial and rhetorical nature of the face‐to‐face social relations encountered in this market. The paper seeks to invigorate the notion of embeddedness by expanding the mechanisms through which socio‐economic relations are understood to arise. The paper offers support to the literature of market devices’ assertion that a concept of materially embedded economic relations can accommodate politics, culture, and regulation, and that it offers a nuanced perspective on agency and identity in the marketplace.     

Embeddedness and local food systems: notes on two types of direct agricultural market

Direct agricultural markets, predicated on face-to-face ties between producers and consumers, are often seen as central components of local food systems. Activists and academic analysts often assume that trust and social connection characterize direct agricultural markets, distinguishing local food systems from the “global food system”. This article examines that premise about direct agricultural markets, using the concept of social embeddedness from economic sociology to analyze the interplay of the economic and the social. Specifically, it draws on Block's (1990) elaboration of the concepts of marketness and instrumentalism to qualify the concept of social embeddedness. Taken together, and augmented by consideration of how they relate to power and privilege, these concepts provide an analytical framework that more accurately describes the social relations of two types of direct agricultural markets — the farmers’ market and community supported agriculture. In providing an alternative market, farmers’ markets create a context for closer social ties between farmers and consumers, but remain fundamentally rooted in commodity relations. In attempting to construct an alternative to the market, as reflected in an explicit emphasis on community and in the distinctive “share” relationship, community supported agriculture moves closer towards the decommodification of food. Nonetheless, in both types of direct markets, tensions between embeddedness, on the one hand, and marketness and instrumentalism, on the other, suggest how power and privilege may sometimes rest more with educated, middle-class consumers than with farmers or less-advantaged consumers. Recognizing how marketness and instrumentalism complicate social embeddedness is critical for understanding the viability, development and prospects of local food systems.     

Networks of action and events over time. A multilevel discrete-time event history model for longitudinal network data

Longitudinal network data recording the moment at which ties appear, change, or disappear are increasingly available. Event history models can be used to analyze the dynamics of time-stamped network data. This paper adapts the discrete-time event history model to social network data. A discrete-time event history model can easily incorporate a multilevel design and time-varying covariates. A multilevel design is needed to account for dependencies among ties and vertices, which should not be ignored in a small longitudinal network. Time-varying covariates are required to analyze network effects, that is, the impact of previous ties. In addition, a discrete-time event history model handles constraints on who can act or who can be acted upon in a straightforward way. The model can be estimated with multilevel logistic regression analysis, which is illustrated by an application to book reviews, so network evolution can be analyzed with a fairly standard statistical tool.     

Keep around,drop, or revise? exploring what becomes of difficult ties in personal networks

Previous studies increasingly recognize the presence and impact of difficult individuals within personal networks. However, current research sheds little light on the turnover, retention, and change in quality of such difficult ties. The current study addresses this gap by focusing on two distinct forms of network change. We examine how role relationships, support exchange, relational homophily, and personal characteristics are associated with these processes. Data are drawn from three waves of the University of California Social Network Study (UCNets), a project containing comprehensive longitudinal data on ego networks among two adult cohorts. Findings indicate that over time, 34% of difficult ties re-appear in people’s networks as sources of aggravation; 26% of difficult ties are removed from the network; and 40% can no longer be verified as problematic network members. Most ties no longer deemed difficult are identified as providing one or more supportive functions. Multinomial multilevel models reveal that exchanging support tends to anchor difficult ties in the network. Kinship, meanwhile, plays a large role in whether difficult ties remain or get dropped. Personal characteristics such as gender, income, and relocation also play a role in these processes. Overall, we conclude that the turnover dynamics of difficult ties are similar to other ties, and the apparent change from negative to positive suggests that many ties hold ambivalent properties that make shedding such ties less common than may be expected.     

Families and their Social Relations in German Cities

This paper looks at the personal embeddedness of families in three German cities (Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart) and examines the community question with data collected at the end of 2003. The study is based on the theoretical views of Barry Wellman, who used a network analysis perspective to conceptualize ‘the Community Question’. The results of the German study have reconfirmed the results of Wellman's East York Study and show that networks are not a product of only one community model. As a consequence it is less helpful to talk about saved, lost and liberated communities but more helpful to regard communities as a mixture of strongly knitted nuclear clusters and broader sparsely knitted relations which have access to different groups and their resources. Most networks consist of kinship, friends, local and long distance ties, multistranded and specialised ties. The current analysis of the data of this study indicates that in German cities there is no correlation between the different distributions of the community.     

Exploring Ambivalence in Family Ties: Progress and Prospects

The 2002 exchange on ambivalence in the Journal of Marriage and Family (Vol. 64, No. 3), published under the editorship of Alexis Walker, prompted an impressive array of research on family ties, in particular intergenerational relationships. Following a discussion of the concept's theoretical underpinnings, the author argues that advancing the concept of ambivalence rests on realizing its multilevel potential by addressing the interplay of shifting contradictions experienced by individuals and in relationships and embedded in social institutions and in macro‐level arrangements and processes. She considers progress and limitations in a critical review of predominant applications of ambivalence and then investigates research that advances ambivalence as a bridging concept across multiple levels of analysis. Work on atypical family ties, dependency, contradictory cultural expectations due to migration and social change, families and the welfare state, and on climate change and disability promotes the multilevel potential of ambivalence and points to ways to advance its promise in theory and practice.     

Vorwort

Although the concept of tie strength plausibly extends opinion leadership theory, prior studies have indicated that tie strength is of minor importance for opinion leadership. The paper argues that strong ties and weak ties play major roles in the process of opinion leadership that prior studies have insufficiently differentiated due to methodological limitations. Against this background, a methodologically more rigorous reassessment of the association between tie strength and opinion leadership is conducted. The reassessment centers on the combination of ego-centered network analyses with statistical methods of multilevel analysis. These are applied to original data of a study by Schenk (2006) on financial opinion leadership in Germany (n?=?10,100 survey respondents) which has previously been considered as an important indication for tie strength’s minor importance. Empirical results show that strong ties and weak ties are remarkably more important in the process of opinion leadership than previously known. Opinion leaders benefit from strong ties, because personal influence can be carried through them comparatively easily. By contrast, weak ties foster opinion leadership in a structural manner by catalyzing the influence that opinion leaders can exert through strong ties.     

The Role of Social Networks in Immigrant Women’s Political Incorporation

This article examines how immigrant women’s social networks affect their propensity to vote and to participate in unconventional political activities, as well as their knowledge of politics and government services and programs. Our primary source of data is a telephone survey of women living in Canada’s two largest metropolitan areas. Our findings show that contrary to the social capital literature, bonding ties do not exert strong negative effects on political incorporation, while bridging ties are not as helpful as hypothesized. What is important for immigrant women are the resources that are embedded in their social networks.     

Individual values,cultural embeddedness,and anti-immigration sentiments: Explaining differences in the effect of values on attitudes toward immigration across Europe

During the last decade, many European countries have faced sizeable immigration inflows accompanied by high prevalence of negative sentiments toward immigrants among majority members of the host societies. We propose that basic human values are one important determinant of such negative attitudes, and we seek to explain variation across countries in the strength of the effects of values. Based on Schwartz’ (1992, 1994) basic human value theory, we hypothesize that universalism values are conducive to positive attitudes toward immigration, while conformity-tradition reinforce anti-immigration sentiments. We furthermore hypothesize that these value effects are moderated by two contextual variables. Both value effects are expected to be weaker in countries with a higher level of cultural embeddedness. Furthermore, negative effects of conformity-tradition values are hypothesized to be cushioned by a lower proportion of immigrants in the country. A multilevel analysis of data from 24 countries from the fourth round of the European Social Survey (2008–2009) supports these hypotheses. Moreover, we demonstrate that the measurement properties of the theoretical constructs exhibit equivalence across countries, thereby justifying statistical comparisons.     

Arbeitsmarktsegregation und Einkommen

What mechanisms link horizontal labour market segregation and the gender gap in wages? One explanation is based on the cultural devaluation of typically ‘female’ skills and work contents which are held responsible for lower earnings in these occupations. In the present study the idea of devaluation of ‘female’ work is contrasted with other possible explanations such as occupational differences in specialized human capital requirements or unpleasant work conditions. Based on a large sample of employed persons in Germany (IAB-Beschaeftigtenstichprobe 1975–1995) and on a survey on work conditions (BIBB/IAB-Erhebung 1991/92), the influence of ‘female’ work contents and other occupational variables on individual earnings is modeled for East and West Germany separately. The results of multilevel analyses accounting for the embeddedness of individuals in occupations and industries show that some ‘female’ work contents — typing, cleaning and selling — decrease income, and thus are culturally devalued. In contrast, occupational differences in specialized human capital requirements and work conditions do seemingly not affect individual wages. In East Germany the results in regard of devaluation are less pronounced. In both parts of the country there is an unabatedly strong effect of individual sex on earnings which cannot be explained by the introduced occupational characteristics.     

Moving Through Social Networks: The Case of Armenian Migrants in the Czech Republic

This paper brings attention to the role of social networks in the migration of asylum seekers and explores how the embeddedness of the migrants in social networks both facilitates and constrains their mobility in different phases of the migration process. It reconstructs the migration paths of eight Armenian migrant families who arrived in the Czech Republic as asylum seekers during the 1990s and the beginning of the twenty‐first century. By examining the narrated stories of the Armenian migrants it shows that social networks formed an important context for employing various migration strategies in all phases of the migration process, and that the meaning and character of migrants’ social networks changed over time. In the initial phase of decision‐making about migration as well as on their journey, it was mainly weak ties of random acquaintances that played a dominant role. The position of the migrants in those networks was rather insecure. They held a little control over the information they received, but in these vulnerable situations they had to rely on their weak ties, which strongly influenced their mobility. In the arrival and settlement phases the social context of the refugee camp hindered the cultivation of social ties outside the migrants’ circle on one hand, and facilitated development of bonding ties among the migrants on the other. Bonding social networks enabled inclusion of the Armenian migrants into various social spheres especially at the beginning of the settlement process. However, the bounded character of these networks was also recognized as excluding them from access to resources of the dominant society and preventing their social mobility in later phases of their settlement. Thus, bridging networks that provide access to certain resources of the dominant society were sought.