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?

Economists in Government An International Comparative Study A.W. COATS, editor The first systematic study of the function of economists in government in international comparative terms. Britain, A.W. Coats; Australia, A. Petridis; India, S. Ambirajan; Norway, Trond Bergh, U.S.A., William J. Barber; Israel, Ephraim Kleiman; Hungary, Egon Kemenes; Japan, Ryutaro Komiya and Kozo Yamamato; Italy, Franco Ferraresi and Giuseppe Ferrari; Brazil, Paulo Roberto Haddad. Published also as Fall 1981 issue of History of Political EconomyIntroduction and Index have been added for book version January 1982 373 pp. $19.75

Labor, class, and the international system

We examine the process of linguistic adaptation among children of immigrants and the extent to which distinct language types exist between foreign monolingualism and a full transition to English. While complete linguistic assimilation remains the normative outcome and is widely perceived as desirable, we examine alternative theories holding that selective rather than full acculturation is a preferable alternative for immigrant children and their families. For this purpose we contrast effects of fluent bilingualism, indicative of selective acculturation, with other types of linguistic adaptation on various measures of family conflict, solidarity and personality. The data come from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study [CILS], which have been used in several previous studies of the second generation. We use this data-set to test new hypotheses on the interactive effects of parental and children's knowledge of English on family relations and personality outcomes and to examine the effects of gender d...

The price of uniformity: language, family and personality adjustment in the immigrant second generation

The hypothesized influence of a best friend's educational and occupational aspirations on the formation of ego's aspirations and the reciprocal influence in the opposite direction can be represented in path diagrams and equation systems involving simultaneous or jointly dependent variables. Standard methods of path analysis may be extended along lines suggested by work in econometrics to secure estimates of coefficients when the models are just identified or overidentified. The most plausible interpretation was reached with a model postulating an underlying factor, "ambition," that is involved in such reciprocal nifluences and accounts for the correlations among the observed indicators, educational aspirations and occupational aspirations. Homophily with respect to background characteristics does not fully explain homophily with respect to ambition; a path coefficient of about 0.2 runs from friend's to respondent's ambition, and one of equal size runs in the opposite direction.

Peer influences on aspirations: a reinterpretation.

R~cent \"es~a~ch 011 strat~fi.cation has moved away from traditional concerns wIth d~sCTlptlOJl ,of mobllrty rales and toward explanation of the processes by 'W/ueh educatIOnal and occut}QI!'onal positions are attained. TJus paper PTesents aud compares the two mam theoretical models emerging from this lme of rescC;T~h. T.he Blau-Duncan a~d lVisconsin models of status attain\"!e~t are sl,!,!lar rn .the causal ordenng of positional variables and )'ield sl~mlaT empmcal estimates Of paths of iflfluence. despite being based on ~dlDeTent samples. The main focus of the Biau-Duncan model is on the SITUC-t:' lure at status tra~smissio~ ifhil~ the lVisconsin model focuses on social psycliOloglca~ dynamKs mullatmg Interpersonal infiu(mces on individual aUainment. n,UerC!lt aspects Of this me4iati?n a.re .discussed on the basis 01 completed lVrsc~nstn research: Practical unplJCatlOns of the two attainment models are exarmned. A paradJgm for future research in this area is presented.

Status Attainment Processes.

This paper summarises a research programme on the new immigrant second generation initiated in the early 1990s and completed in 2006. The four field waves of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS) are described and the main theoretical models emerging from it are presented and graphically summarised. After considering critical views of this theory, we present the most recent results from this longitudinal research programme in the form of quantitative models predicting downward assimilation in early adulthood and qualitative interviews identifying ways for the disadvantaged children of immigrants to escape it. Quantitative results strongly support the predicted effects of exogenous variables identified by segmented assimilation theory and identify the intervening factors during adolescence that mediate their influence on adult outcomes. Qualitative evidence gathered during the last stage of the study points to three factors that can lead to exceptional educational achievement among disadvantaged youths, and which indicate the positive influence of selective acculturation. Finally, the implications of these findings for theory and policy are discussed.

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Alejandro Portes

Papers

Labor, class, and the international system

The price of uniformity: language, family and personality adjustment in the immigrant second generation

Peer influences on aspirations: a reinterpretation.

Status Attainment Processes.

The Adaptation of the Immigrant Second Generation in America: A Theoretical Overview and Recent Evidence