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?

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.

La asimilación segmentada sobre el terreno: la nueva segunda generación al inicio de la vida adulta segmented assimilation on the ground: the new second generation in early

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: Introduction

Urbanización en Centroamérica

A Hundred Years from Weber: Science as Vocation and the Resurgence of National Populism1

Models and Realities: The Consequences of Immigration@@@The Immigration Debate: Studies on the Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration

Alejandro Portes

Papers

La asimilación segmentada sobre el terreno: la nueva segunda generación al inicio de la vida adulta segmented assimilation on the ground: the new second generation in early

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: Introduction

Urbanización en Centroamérica

A Hundred Years from Weber: Science as Vocation and the Resurgence of National Populism1

Models and Realities: The Consequences of Immigration@@@The Immigration Debate: Studies on the Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration