Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localize...

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Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks

This paper reviews the origins and definitions of social capital in the writings of Bourdieu, Loury, and Coleman, among other authors. It distinguishes four sources of social capital and examines their dynamics. Applications of the concept in the sociological literature emphasize its role in social control, in family support, and in benefits mediated by extrafamilial networks. I provide examples of each of these positive functions. Negative consequences of the same processes also deserve attention for a balanced picture of the forces at play. I review four such consequences and illustrate them with relevant examples. Recent writings on social capital have extended the concept from an individual asset to a feature of communities and even nations. The final sections describe this conceptual stretch and examine its limitations. I argue that, as shorthand for the positive consequences of sociability, social capital has a definite place in sociological theory. However, excessive extensions of the concept may j...

/pdf/social-capital-its-origins-and-applications-in-modern-1u65djoshv.pdf

Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology

This chapter aims to develop one of perhaps multiple specifications of embeddedness, a concept that has been used to refer broadly to the contingent nature of economic action with respect to cognition, social structure, institutions, and culture. Research on embeddedness is an exciting area in sociology and economics because it advances understanding of how social structure affects economic life. The chapter addresses propositions about the operation and outcomes of interfirm networks that are guided implicitly by ceteris paribus assumptions. While economies of time due to embeddedness have obvious benefits for the individual firm, they also have important implications for allocative efficiency and the determination of prices. Under the conditions, social processes that increase integration combine with resource dependency problems to increase the vulnerability of networked organizations. The level of investment in an economy promotes positive changes in productivity, standards of living, mobility, and wealth generation.

Social Structure and Competition in Interfirm Networks: The Paradox of Embeddedness

A growing number of sociologists, political scientists, economists, and organizational theorists have invoked the concept of social capital in the search for answers to a broadening range of questions being confronted in their own fields. Seeking to clarify the concept and help assess its utility for organizational theory, we synthesize the theoretical research undertaken in these various disciplines and develop a common conceptual framework that identifies the sources, benefits, risks, and contingencies of social capital.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/4134367.pdf

Social Capital: Prospects for a New Concept

The Behavioral Model of Health Services Use was initially developed over 25 years ago. In the interim it has been subject to considerable application, reprobation, and alteration. I review its development and assess its continued relevance.

Revisiting the behavioral model and access to medical care: does it matter?

The literature on immigrant entrepreneurship in the advanced countries tends to paint these initiatives in homogeneous colors. A debate lingers as well on the economic returns to self-employment by...

They are not all the same: immigrant enterprises, transnationalism, and development*

We examine the institutions that comprise the U.S. health system and their relationship to a surging immigrant population. The clash between the system and this human flow originates in the large number of immigrants who are unauthorized, poor, and uninsured and, hence, unable to access a system largely based on ability to pay. Basic concepts from sociological theory are brought to bear on the analysis of this clash and its consequences. Data from a recently completed study of health institutions in three areas of the United States are used as an empirical basis to illustrate various aspects of this complex relation. Implications of our results for theory and future health policy are discussed.

/pdf/the-u-s-health-system-and-immigration-an-institutional-1rc8xjxe8z.pdf

The U.S. Health System and Immigration: An Institutional Interpretation

An important way to understand the contemporary authoritarian state is a detailed analysis of the evolution of its policies toward different sectors of civil society. The urban lower classes especially those grouped in the spatially distinct units formed by "favelas" "barriadas" and the like are particularly important in this regard and this discussion reviews the evolution of public policy in Rio de Janeiro toward the favelas since 1972-73. Possibly the most current and useful contribution to theory in this area is the concept of the bureaucratic authoritarian state developed by Guillermo ODonnell (1975). Based largely on the recent experiences of Brazil Chile and Argentina the concept of the BA state summarizes a series of central features generally accepted as characteristic of this form of government. Among them are: the effort to weaken or eliminate working class organizations or other instruments of popular demand making; the transformation of popular needs into administrative matters outside the policital realm; the containment of inflation at the expense of popular consumption; and the attempt to generate "confidence" among international captial investors by guaranteeing a stable environment economically and politically. Both types of populist authoritarian regimes--the civil and the military--have approached the problem of urban squatter settlements in a similar manner. The fundamental orientation has been toward in situ improvement of existing settlements. This "urbanization" policy takes the form of legalization of land titles credit for construction materials and extension of urban services. It is rare that the population of a settlement is eradicated by force. When removal occurs it is usually at the request of the inhabitants themselves. In the civil single party state assistance for squatter settlements is deliberately erratic and granted on a case by case basis. In contrast the reformist military regimes try to give their urban policy a certain internal coherence. The "military oligarchic" state considers demand making from below as in principle subversive. Popular masses are not politically manipulated or integrated but reorganized on the basis of government blueprints. Directives determining their situation are issued from above and supported by the liberal use of coercion. The idea of "order" in the city is ultimately translated into the physical segregation of the different classes and the preservation of the most desirable areas for exclusive use of the middle and upper class. Housing and other welfare programs are originally established to alter the image of a regime based on force but in turn widespread use of force makes possible the perversion of their original goals for the benefit of intervening bureaucracies and their new chosen clienteles.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/2502876

Housing policy urban poverty and the state: the favelas of Rio de Janeiro 1972-1976.

This article presents an outline of the relationship between migration and the city in its evolution over time. I sketch the central aspects of this historical relation as a prelude to examining three aspects of the contemporary scene: the various determinants of contemporary labour flows; the political sources of resistance to international migration; and the renewed protagonist role of metropolitan areas as strategic nodes of the international system. As part of the latter process, I sketch the rise of transnationalism as a novel form of adaptation to immigration and as a potential response to the overriding logic of global capitalism. Implications of a migration-centred approach to cities for theory and policy are dismissed.

Alejandro Portes

Papers

They are not all the same: immigrant enterprises, transnationalism, and development*

The U.S. Health System and Immigration: An Institutional Interpretation

Housing policy urban poverty and the state: the favelas of Rio de Janeiro 1972-1976.

Immigration and the metropolis: Reflections on urban history

Ciudades latinoamericanas : un análisis comparativo en el umbral del nuevo siglo