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...

/pdf/birds-of-a-feather-homophily-in-social-networks-3kjmeyr23w.pdf

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?

This article presents an overview of the Hispanic population of the United States, focusing on the sources of its growth, its internal composition, its connections with the countries of origin, its role in the U.S. economy, and the emerging second generation. Intergenerational differences in outlooks and self-identities and the forces leading to the emergence of a “thick” Hispanic identity in the second generation are examined. The obstacles to successful integration faced by this youthful population and evidence of both “upward” and “downward” assimilation among its members are analyzed. Implications for the field of race and ethnic relations and for public policy toward immigrants and their offspring are discussed.

The new latin nation

En el ultimo decenio del siglo XX, America Latina experimento un vuelco extraordinario a medida que los paises abandonaban, una tras otra la consigna de la industrializacion autonoma, que habian preconizado los propios intelectuales en una etapa anterior, y se embarcaban en un nuevo modelo de desarrollo basado en las economias abiertas y en la competencia global. El neoliberalismo, como se ha denominado a este modelo, es en realidad una vuelta al pasado, cuando los paises latinoamericanos participaban en la economia mundial sobre la base de sus ventajas comparativas como productores de bienes primarios, en tanto que importaban manufacturas y tecnologia del mundo industrializado. Habia sido precisamente, la vulnerabilidad de estas economias sujetas a los vaivenes de los mercados externos lo que aconsejo las politicas neokeynesianas de sustitucion de importaciones a mediados del siglo XX (Prebisch, 1950; Furtado, 1970). Las politicas recomendadas por la resucitada ortodoxia liberal y el Consenso de Washington", que les dio el respaldo ideologico, han sido descritos extensamente en la literatura contemporanea de las ciencias sociales (Sunkel, 2001; Robinson, 1996; Portes, 1997). Tambien han sido analizadas las consecuencias de esas politicas, tanto en funcion del crecimiento economico como de la equidad social (Filgueira, 1996; Roberts, 2001; de la Rocha, 2001). Menor atencion han merecido las repercusiones de esta profunda reorientacion de los paises latinoamericanos sobre sus estructuras sociales y, particularmente, en los patrones de estratificacion social del largo plazo. La estructura de clases de estas sociedades no podia, ni tampoco pudo, mantenerse al margen de los grandes cambios producidos en su organizacion productiva y en el comercio mundial global. Aunque organismos tales como la Organizacion Internacional del Trabajo (OIT) y la Comision Economica para America Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL) han estudiado la evolucion de la pobreza y la desigualdad en la region, su enfoque analitico no les ha permitido formular estas tendencias sistematicamente desde la perspectiva de las clases sociales (CEPAL, 2000; OIT, 2000). El concepto de clase social - dado su origen marxista y la consiguiente connotacion de nociones tales como conflicto, privilegio y explotacion (Grusky y Sorensen, 1998; Wright, 1997)- suele excluirse de las publicaciones oficiales de dichas organizaciones. Sin embargo, tal omision implica pasar por alto aspectos significativos de la dinamica social contemporanea, al privarla de una valiosa herramienta analitica. En este trabajo se intenta salvar esta falencia se reintroduce explicitamente a las clases sociales como marco conceptual para el analisis de las sociedades latinoamericanas contemporaneas, se aporta estimaciones empiricas y se procura explicar tambien como han variado entre paises y a traves del tiempo3. El analisis puede interpretarse como una extension explicita y una revision de un articulo anterior, publicado hace diecisiete anos, mediante el cual se intento describir la estructura de clases en las sociedades latinoamericanas durante la etapa final del proceso de sustitucion de importaciones (Portes, 1985)."

Las estructuras de clase en América Latina: composición y cambios durante la época neoliberal

/pdf/the-informal-economy-perspectives-from-latin-america-3lw8a4ukwx.pdf

The Informal Economy: Perspectives from Latin America

From South of the Border: Hispanic Minorities in the United States

We review the literature on segmented assimilation and alternative theoretical models on the adaptation of the second generation; summarize the theoretical frame work developed in the course of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study; and present evidence from its third survey in South Florida bearing on alternative hypotheses. We find that the majority of second generation youths are moving ahead educationally and occupationally, but that a significant minority is being left behind. The latter group is not distributed randomly across nationalities, but corresponds closely to predictions based on immigrant parents’ human capital, family type, and modes of incorporation. While it is clear that members of the second generation, whether successful or unsuccessful will assimilate – in the sense of learning English and American culture – it makes a great deal of difference whether they do so by joining the main stream middle-class or the marginalized, and largely racialized, population at the bottom. Narratives drawn from the ethnographic module accompanying the survey put into perspective quantitative results and high light the realities of segmented assimilation as it takes place today in U.S. society.

Alejandro Portes

Papers

The new latin nation

Las estructuras de clase en América Latina: composición y cambios durante la época neoliberal

The Informal Economy: Perspectives from Latin America

From South of the Border: Hispanic Minorities in the United States

La asimilación segmentada sobre el terreno: la nueva segunda generación al inicio de la vida adulta