Representations for homomorphisms

Five different solutions to the problem of finding empirical meanings for the algebraically useful technique of homomorphisms in blockmodeling are described. They are the Lorrain-White, Pattison, Wu, modified Wu, and Bonacich approaches. All of them are designed to give meaning to a homomorphism in terms of characteristics of the relational matrices producing a semigroup, but they emphasize different aspects of the data. The Lorrain-White approach assumes that sets of relations are alternative expressions of an “underlying” relation. The Pattison and Bonacich approaches assume an underlying “clique” structure of structurally equivalent individuals. The Wu approaches assume that there is an “elite” set of individuals whose relational patterns define the homomorphism.     

Structures of connectivity

From the earliest days of research on blockmodeling, one primary goal was to develop a method that would exploit the algebra of the social relations among individuals to describe the social structure of the group. This goal was reluctantly abandoned, however, because the presence of idiosyncratic relational ties in the data obscured the structure and no reliable method for identifying these ties existed. This paper presents such a method. We have found it useful to distinguish emotionally weak ties (Granovetter 1973), those with low intensity, from structurally weak ties, those that fail to conform to the pattern of ties that exist in and are reinforced by the social structure. The latter type of weak ties are the idiosyncratic ties that interfere with attempts to describe a social structure. This paper operationalizes the concept of structurally weak ties and presents an algebraic method for identifying them in sociometric data. This enables us to use the algebra of social relations to identify a blockmodel that describes the social structure of the group.     

Knowing what is good for you: Empirical analysis of personal preferences and the “objective good”

This paper aims to test empirically if certain frequently used measures of well-being, which are regarded as valuable properties of human life, are actually desired by people. In other words, it investigates whether the “expert judgments” in social science overlap with social consensus on what the “good life” is. The starting hypothesis is that there is an overlap between these two in the case of basic needs. For the analysis, individuals’ self-reported life satisfaction is used as a proxy for “utility”, based on survey data, which includes about 30,000 individuals from 21 different European countries. The results indicate that the commonly used measures of well-being – labour market situation, health, housing conditions and social relations – significantly influence people's satisfaction, ceteris paribus. Next, the stability of preferences is tested using Hungarian data from the 1990s. The results indicate that there was only very limited change in the relationship between life satisfaction and basic measures of well-being despite the landslide of societal and economic transformation.     

Are social networks technologically embedded?: How networks are changing today with changes in communication technology

Communication mediated by various technologies (from ordinary mail to today's Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)) provides important evidence for the study of social networks. Given that networks generate the possibility of interpersonal communication, data on technology use can provide important information on sociability. However, it is also true that personal networks not only shape, but also are shaped by technological means for communication, since these entail the re-constituting of social ties and the re-drawing of social boundaries. We use material from empirical studies carried out over the last 3 years to develop our hypothesis of the way forms of relationship change with technology. In particular, we try to understand the relationship between social networks (a set of social ties possessing one or more relational dimensions), exchanges between actors (made up of a succession of embodied gestures and language acts) and the various technical means for communication available today, which enable an exchange to be completed. Each of these three poles poses constraints on interaction, and provides resources for it, and thus all three shape the form relational practices take. Empirical data show how technological means of communication allow people to re-negotiate the constraints of individual time rhythms, and of who one communicates with. They also illustrate how the relational economy (and power) is affected by the deployment of communication technologies. Tools of communication provide new resources to negotiate individual timetables and social exchanges, making it possible to adjust roles, hierarchies and forms of power in relational economies. We argue that the general change observed over the last 20 years is from established roles to mutual reachability. The traditional communication model, where tele-communication is used to connect people who are physically separated from each other, is gradually being supplanted with a new pattern of “connected presence”. In this new mode other people are telephoned, “SMSed”, seen and mailed in alternated way and small gestures or signs of attention are at least as important as the message content itself.     

Racial Glass Ceilings,Gendered Responses: Taiwanese American Professionals’ Experiences of Otherness

This article examines Taiwanese American professionals’ interpretations of the glass ceiling to illuminate the manifestations of structural inequality at the micro-level of social life. Data are based on 40 in-depth interviews in the Chicago metropolitan area. Findings suggest that racial inequalities are experienced through race relations. Ethnic cultures construct relational fences along racial lines that designate the place of each group in the racial hierarchy. Although frustrated and alienated by their marginalized position, women and men use different strategies to negotiate the meaning of being an “other.” Women act confrontationally to transgress social boundaries, while men adopt acquiescent and coalitional approaches to dwell in their designated territories. I argue that race intersects with gender and citizenship in shaping the salience of individuals’ social identities, which affects their responses to racial inequality in the white-collar workplace.     

A relational approach to social impact: Moving beyond instrumental and consumer approaches

Social impact can be understood as the real or perceived, intended or unintended, relational and agentic consequences that emerge from organizational decisions or actions for individuals, communities, and societies. Inherent here is the recognition that social impact aligns with consequences, whether it be on individuals, communities, and societies, and that these consequences stem from organizational decisions and behaviors. Drawing on wider social impact scholarship, this paper identifies two approaches—instrumental and consumer—that have provided lenses on how organizations make decisions about social impact and related consequences, and the level of involvement stakeholders have in these decisions. This paper proposes that the understanding of social impact should evolve to reflect the relational worldview advocated in the public relations discipline, which is one that emphasizes the importance of organizations, individuals, and communities contributing to a fully functioning society. A relational lens shows that social impact can be understood as changes—whether they be intended or unintended, anticipated or unanticipated, positive or negative—in the way people live, experience, sustain, and function within their society, resulting from organizational decisions and consequent behaviors as co-determined by organizations and their stakeholders. The relational approach requires the adoption of a relational perspective on identifying, predicting, evaluating, managing, and reporting on social impact, operationalized via the seven-step Relational Framework of Social Impact conceptualized in this paper. While social impact is a relatively new term in the public relations literature, this paper highlights how public relations scholarship is well placed to enrich the social impact discipline due its emphasis on fostering a fully functioning society.     

A SENSE OF PLACE:

One of the classic questions in urban sociology is how social relations and solidarity are maintained in an urbanized, industrialized, bureaucratic society. The two pivotal research focuses have been the issues of (1) the persistence of territorially based affective ties and primary relations in an urban world and (2) the micro/macro links connecting community residents and the larger society. This article argues that social bonds and solidarity are now transformed from affective ties into more diffuse relationships as individuals purposively use the externally shared meanings of housing and community in American society to situate themselves, simultaneously locating themselves with others who share their values and preferences and asserting their social status and social identity to others.     

Synesthetizing Sound Studies and the Sociology of Technology

This paper examines current issues at the intersection of the Sociology of Technology and the interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies. It begins with an overview of major social constructionist, interpretive semiotic, and actor–network theoretical sociological approaches to technology as developed within the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Considering the predominance of narrative visual metaphors in these approaches' treatment of socio‐technical perception, it is argued that the “turn to sound” in social studies of technology, rather than simply furnishing established analytic approaches with a fresh set of empirical cases (i.e. “sound technologies”), presents an opportunity to better sensitize STS approaches to the contingent socio‐technical shaping and distribution of embodied perceptual modalities in general. A critical review of recent social and historical studies of sound and technology, attending especially to debates surrounding the theoretical shift from acoustemological or soundscape‐based to signal‐oriented “transductive” approaches, suggests the importance for future STS and Sound Studies work of addressing how shared modes of sensory perception are produced within particular socio‐technical frames.     

A network centrality bias: Central individuals in workplace networks have more supportive coworkers

Combining the results of two empirical studies, we investigate the role of alters’ motivation in explaining change in ego’s network position over time. People high in communal motives, who are prone to supportive and altruistic behavior in their interactions with others as a way to gain social acceptance, prefer to establish ties with co-workers occupying central positions in organizational social networks. This effect results in a systematic network centrality bias: The personal network of central individuals (individuals with many incoming ties from colleagues) is more likely to contain more supportive and altruistic people than the personal network of individuals who are less central (individuals with fewer incoming ties). This result opens the door to the possibility that the effects of centrality so frequently documented in empirical studies may be due, at least in part, to characteristics of the alters in an ego’s personal community, rather than to egos themselves. Our findings invite further empirical research on how alters’ motives affect the returns that people can reap from their personal networks in organizations.     

Gender,rank, and social networks on an enterprise social media platform

In this paper, we harness server-side data—540,000 messages generated by 2085 users on TamTamy, an Enterprise Social Media (ESM) platform—to examine how gender and rank shaped “homophily” (the tendency to connect with similar others) and centrality in an ESM network. Drawing on the logic of “distinctiveness theory,” which argues that the numeric rarity of a category in a given setting promotes the use of that category as a basis for connecting with others, we hypothesized and found: (a) the tendency to connect with same-gender others was stronger among women than among men; (b) the tendency to connect with same-rank others was stronger among high-ranking employees than among low-ranking employees; (c) for high-ranking men, rank was more important than gender as a basis for connecting with others; and (d) for low-ranking women, gender was more important than rank as a basis for connecting with others. We also found that whereas higher ranking individuals were more likely to be in central (bridging) positions in the overall network, gender was unrelated to network centrality. Our study suggests that the affordances of ESM for open and distributed communications notwithstanding, the social networks that emerge on ESM platforms may reinforce social stratification on some dimensions while diminishing it on others.     

Structural equivalence: Meaning and definition,computation and application

This paper presents a generalization of the concept of “structural equivalence”, the key concept in algebraic approaches to the study of social networks. Two points in a graph or set of relations will be called “structurally related” if they are connected in the same ways to structurally related points.It is suggested that this new definition suitably weakens Lorrain and White's categorical approach, and is more appropriate than CONCOR. Structural relatedness is compared to these approaches via several simple examples.     

France and the Unknown Second Generation: Preliminary Results on Social Mobility

The growing concern about the future of the offspring of immigrants in France has prompted the rise of a “second generation question.” Access of “new second generations” (i.e., those born from the waves of immigration of the 1950s and 1960s) to the job market and their visibility in social and cultural life have challenged the “French model of integration.” Moreover, the ebbing of social mobility in the France of the 1970s led to a process of social downgrading which may affect significantly the second generation due to their social background and the persistence of ethnic and racial discrimination. It is thus important to investigate what kind of social mobility is actually experienced by people of immigrant ancestry, and what could hinder their mobility. This article uses the data from a new survey, the Enquête Histoire Familiale (family history survey) conducted in 1999 and based on 380,000 individuals, which analyzes the positions of second generations of Turkish, Moroccan and Portuguese origin. We argue that they follow different paths: a reproduction of the positions of the first generation; a successful social mobility through education; or a mobility hindered by discrimination.     

Deviant social positions in small groups: The relation between role and individual

This paper studies a deviant social position within a small group of Italian Fishermen. The role of “court-jester” emerges and, as the title suggests, the relation between this role and the inherent properties of the deviant are explored. It is argued that the emergence of roles among deviant social positions is dependent upon the personal attributes of the deviant and the characteristics of his relations to other members of the group.     

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.     

Chronic Homelessness Among Working-Age Adults: Personal Problems and Public Assistance

As rapid changes have occurred in the economic and cultural structures of society, some have found themselves more disadvantaged than others. The mismatch between income and the cost of housing means that some of the poor will inevitably become homeless. Given the economics of the situation, prevention of homelessness is a non-issue; more germane is the question of chronic homelessness. This paper takes the position that determining who is most likely to be chronically homeless is related to the cultural ideology of individualism and, more specifically, that the situations likely to create the greatest vulnerability are problems for which individuals are seen as personally responsible. The distress brought about by societal-level changes is manifested in the “personal” problems of individuals. The social welfare system, acting as a substitute for failed social institutions, recreates their failures by relying on a cultural ethos that blames individuals for occupying positions to which the society has relegated them.     

A Social Capital Basis for Environmental Concern: Evidence from Northern New England*

This study, based on a random‐digit‐dialing telephone survey of adults in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, uses ordinary least squares regression to examine a relatively neglected element in the sociological literature on environmental concern, namely, the influence of an individual's social capital on the formation of environmental attitudes. We argue that it is those individuals with a greater diversity of social connections who are most likely to be influenced by ecological perspectives grounded in conservation and environmental protection. Controlling for other theoretically relevant variables, we regress an index of environmental concern that gives special emphasis to environmental‐economic trade‐offs on our measures of relational and community social capital. While confirming much of the earlier work in this area, our model provides evidence that connections to other people play an important role in determining individual concern for the environment. Specifically, the number of respondents' “weak ties”—that is, not their closest relationships—and the average occupational status of respondents' social ties, in general, were both positively correlated with environmental concern. Additionally, one of our three measures of community social capital, the number of visits from friends over the past month, was statistically significant and negatively correlated with environmental concern.     

Inter-ethnic friendship and negative ties in secondary school

This paper investigates several different aspects of inter-ethnic relationships. It focuses on friendships and negative ties between secondary school students from different ethnic backgrounds, introducing and measuring two different aspects of ethnicity: self-declared ethnicity, and ethnicity based on peer perception. These are first applied separately and then together on a sample of secondary school students in Hungary consisting of two ethnic groups: Roma and non-Roma Hungarian (N = 420). Friendships and negative ties are modelled using cross-sectional exponential random graph models for sixteen classrooms separately, and then individual models are summarized using meta-analysis. Based on the social identity approach, we predict that inter-ethnic friendships are less likely, and negative ties are more likely, than those within ethnic groups; and that majority students reject their minority peers more than the other way around. Moreover, minority students are expected to exclude those whom they perceive as minorities, but who, at the same time, identify with the majority group, since these classmates might seem to them as “traitors” of their “original” ethnic group. Results mostly confirm our hypotheses, emphasizing the role of perceived ethnicity: majority students tend to dislike peers whom they perceive as minorities, regardless of these peers’ self-declared ethnicity; on the other hand, minority students are likely to send friendship nominations towards their perceived minority classmates if these also declare themselves as minorities, but, as predicted, negative nominations if these declare themselves as majorities. This supports our general idea that different ethnicity aspects might influence friendships and negative ties in different ways, and inconsistencies in someone's ethnic categorization might play an important role in social rejection.     

Standing their ground: Southern white hegemonic defense of place through camouflaged narrative continuity

Public relations research typically conceptualizes the practice as organization-centric by emphasizing strategies, tactics, and tools used to achieve objectives that advance organizational interests. Often less organizational but essential to understanding community self-governance, grassroots actors use public relations to defend, advance, or challenge ideographs such as freedom, democracy or environmental quality. The ideograph analyzed in this case is the postbellum narrative continuity of “Southern Heritage not Hate” which served as camouflage for redeeming the Lost Cause, the argument that the South did not lose the Civil War. This essay normatively identifies, interprets and judges public relations strategies southern advocates used to “stand their ground” by defining place as a cultural issue and source of relational agency. This grassroots public relations campaign sought to defeat the post-Civil War Reconstruction narrative continuity that fostered the societal agency of African Americans; postbellum activists re-imposed a narrative favorable to Southern white male hegemony. To stand their ground, “Southern” voices used military textuality, focused on CSA General Robert E. Lee, as narrative continuity during the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865), Reconstruction (1865–1876), and Jim Crow (1877–1954). The term “camouflage” is used to explore this narrative and critically illuminate how text can define place so as to make it seem different than it is. Camouflage encodes messages differently to different decoders; it conceals as it reveals. Such strategies are typically more emergent contextually than the result of a grand plan. Through grassroots activism by groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans, what once was overt became covert regarding national military culture.     

Ideological Primary Groups in Contemporary Cultural Movements

Abstract

This paper argues that “post-modern” societies generate movements for cultural change in models “of” and “for” identity and consciousness, rather than traditional kinds of social movements aiming at structural changes in institutional arrangements. The distinctive and crucial unit in comtemporary cultural movements is what we have termed the “ideological group.” These groups are similar to the “ideological informal groups” which recruited members of traditional social movements on the basis of personal contacts and confidence, and which rested on shared “inner convictions.” Like other, earlier, ideological groups, they focus on the construction and legitimation of a shared symbolic interpretation, and ideology of a dissatisfying reality as well as their own personal and collective identity in relation to it. However, contemporary movement groups have been influenced considerably by the sensitivity training-encounter-group dynamics techniques associated with the intensive group movement. The result is a new interest in artificial primary relations among sociologically homogeneous peers for joining socio-cultural analyses with psychological interpretations of common personal experiences. The processes generated in these ideological primary groups lead to the collective construction of new or modified ideological interpretations of reality which contain different, more satisfying, models “of” and “for” personal and group identity, and “consciousness.”     

Relational Equity as a Design Tool Within Making and Tinkering Activities

This article focuses on the partner-like relations that emerge between undergraduates and youth as they engage in “Making and Tinkering” activities in an afterschool learning ecology, and illustrates the potential for designed tinkering activity to produce relational equity among participants. Grounded in sociocultural theory, but leveraging theoretical contributions from learning sciences and tinkering research, we draw on ethnographic data across one year to examine how the social organization of Making & Tinkering activities provides necessary social conditions for “feedback-in-practice” and consequential learning. Analyses of interactions reveal how more symmetrical intergenerational relationships serve in the design of equitable learning spaces.