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...

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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?

ABSTRACT As a prelude to the following essays on nine cities selected as strategic research sites, this introduction traces, in summary fashion, the linkages between migration and the development of the capitalist world economy, including, the rise of cities and their development. The history of migration during these five centuries encompasses the movement of European settlers to the new colonies, followed by three centuries of trans-Atlantic slave trade leading in turn, to deliberate labour recruitment in three continents and, eventually, to the contemporary self-driven flows of both labourers and refugees. A final diagram summarizes this evolution and seeks to situate the origin and development of the nine selected cities within it.

Cities and migration

DRAFT – DO NOT DISTRIBUTE, QUOTE OR CITE WITHOUT THE AUTHORS’ PERMISSION. IMMIGRANT AMERICA: A PORTRAIT (4th edition, forthcoming) Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut Chapter 2 Theoretical Overview

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Theoretical Overview: Theories of International Migration and Immigrant Adaptation

Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality. Edited by David Card and Steven Raphael. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013. Pp. xiv+469. $55.00 (paper).

The article analyzes the explanatory limitations of a "mercantile theoretical" approach towards the explanation of the unexpected results of the neoliberal policies applied in Latin America. This shortcoming is key product of the absence of a theoretical proposal about the articulations between the economy and social structure. To compensate for this, the article proposes the use of concepts coined by economic sociology such as socialnetworks, social capital, social reserve of collective action, unexpected consequences, amongst others, which show how institutions, social structures and demographic tendencies constitute elements that should be taken into consideration in the explanation and application of any development model.

El neoliberalismo y la sociología del desarrollo: tendencias emergentes y efectos inesperados

This book is an invaluable contribution to the scientific research literature on international migration. The volume is the joint product of a Committee on South-North Migration, appointed in 1991 by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. Members of this international committee are the co-authors of the book and were responsible for initial drafts of chapters dealing with different world regions and the linkage between migration and national or community development. The overall responsibility for organization of the book and for the core chapter on theories on international migration rested on the Committee's chair, Douglas S. Massey. He is also responsible for the chapter on migration to North America. This is not an edited volume, but a jointly written book that exemplifies international scientific cooperation as its best. The original task was daunting: to systematically review all existing theories of the determinants of international migration, and then to examine the specializedliterature in all global migration \"systems\" within the framework provided by the original theoretical review. Five such systems are identified: North America, Western Europe, the Persian Gulf, Asia and the Pacific, and South America. Additional chapters deal with the relationships between migration and national and community development, respectively. The initial theoretical review chapter has been published previously as a journal article. It deals with origins of international migrant flows and of the continuity and directionality of these flows over time. Overall, this review is exemplary by its breadth and clarity of exposltlon. One might quibble with the attribution of concepts and propositions to certain authors to the neglect of others and with the obvious leaning of the review toward certain preferred positions, such as that labeled the \"new economics\" of migration. But these subjective preferences are understandable and do not detract from the general fairness and comprehensiveness of coverage. The authors clearly strive for balance and to give each theoretical perspective from classical economics to contemporary social networks theory their due. The effort to systematically frame the review of the literature on each regional migration system into the typology of theories developed in this initial chapter is commendable. The effort does not succeed equally well in each case for two reasons: first, the typology itself is somewhat cumbersome, mixing ideas at different levels of abstraction; second, most regional research literatures are still too feeble to support the task of systematic theory testing. All the regional chapters are valuable because of the depth and range of coverageof the respective literatures. They would stand as distinct contributions even without the attempt to place them into the same theoretical framework. Not surprisingly, this attempt succeeds best in the North American system, which generated most of the theoretical ideas reviewed originally. This chapter has also been published previously. The chapters on migration in Europe and in Asia, drafted by Joaquin Arango and Graeme Hugo, respectively, are notable by the deft integration of theory and research and the effort to bring regional studies to bear systematically on different conceptual perspectives. Even in these chapters, however, one discerns the evident strain of fitting regional literatures with different problems and concerns into a single common mold. That strain becomes even clearer in the chapters on South America and the Gulf systems, drafted by Pellegrino and Kouaouci, respectively.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/019791830003400314

Alejandro Portes

Papers

Cities and migration

Theoretical Overview: Theories of International Migration and Immigrant Adaptation

Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality. Edited by David Card and Steven Raphael. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013. Pp. xiv+469. $55.00 (paper).

El neoliberalismo y la sociología del desarrollo: tendencias emergentes y efectos inesperados

Book Review: Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millennium