计量经济分析 = Econometric analysis

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

The cultural origins of human cognition

By Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge, 2010), xxx + 607 pp. £15.99 paper. A combination of social theory, statistical data, illustrations, and interviews, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judg...

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

Matrix Factorization Techniques for Recommender Systems

The rise of big data—data that are not only large and massively multivariate but concern a dizzying array of phenomena—represents a watershed moment for the social sciences. These data have created demand for new methods that reduce/simplify the dimensionality of data, identify novel patterns and relations, and predict outcomes, from computational ethnography and computational linguistics to network science, machine learning, and in situ experiments. Such developments have led scholars to begin new lines of social inquiry. Company engineers, computer scientists, and social scientists have all converged on big data, creating the possibility of a vibrant “trading zone” for collaboration. However, strong differences in research frameworks help explain why big data may not be an egalitarian trading zone across fields, but rather—at least in the short term—a moment when engineering colonizes sociology more than vice versa. In the long term, however, we suggest there may be the possibility of a constructive synthesis across paradigms in what we term ‘forensic social science.’

Sociology in the Era of Big Data: The Ascent of Forensic Social Science

A recurring theme in sociological research is the tradeoff between fitting in and standing out. Recent work examining this tension has privileged network structural accounts over cultural explanations. We remedy this imbalance by developing a theory of how structural and cultural embeddedness jointly relate to individual attainment within organizations. Given that organizational culture is hard to observe, we develop a novel approach to assessing individuals' cultural fit with their colleagues in an organization based on the language expressed in internal email communications. Drawing on a unique data set that includes a corpus of 10.25 million email messages exchanged over five years among 601 employees in a high-technology firm, we find that network constraint impedes, while cultural fit promotes, individual attainment. More importantly, we find evidence of a tradeoff between the two forms of embeddedness: cultural fit benefits individuals with low network constraint (i.e., brokers) but hurts highly constrained actors.

Fitting In or Standing Out? The Tradeoffs of Structural and Cultural Embeddedness

How do Americans organize their political beliefs? This article argues that party polarization and the growing prominence of moral issues in recent decades have catalyzed different responses by different groups of Americans. The article investigates systematic heterogeneity in the organization of political attitudes using relational class analysis, a graph-based method for detecting multiple patterns of opinion in survey data. Three subpopulations, each characterized by a distinctive way of organizing its political beliefs, are identified: ideologues, whose political attitudes strongly align with either liberal or conservative categories; alternatives, who are instead morally conservative but economically liberal, or vice versa; and agnostics, who exhibit weak associations between political beliefs. Individuals’ sociodemographic profiles, particularly their income, education, and religiosity, lie at the core of the different ways in which they understand politics. Results show that while ideologues have g...

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Neither ideologues nor agnostics: : alternative voters' belief system in an age of partisan politics

We propose a synthesis of two lines of sociological research on boundary spanning in cultural production and consumption. One, research on cultural omnivorousness, analyzes choice by heterogeneous audiences facing an array of crisp cultural offerings. The other, research on categories in markets, analyzes reactions by homogeneous audiences to objects that vary in the degree to which they conform to categorical codes. We develop a model of heterogeneous audiences evaluating objects that vary in typicality. This allows consideration of orientations on two dimensions of cultural preference: variety and typicality. We propose a novel analytic framework to map consumption behavior in these two dimensions. We argue that one audience type, those who value variety and typicality, are especially resistant to objects that span boundaries. We test this argument in an analysis of two large-scale datasets of reviews of films and restaurants.

/pdf/what-does-it-mean-to-span-cultural-boundaries-variety-and-1vuyr1fe24.pdf

What Does It Mean to Span Cultural Boundaries? Variety and Atypicality in Cultural Consumption

A recurring theme in sociological research is the tradeoff between fitting in and standing out. Prior work examining this tension tends to take either a structural or a cultural perspective. We fus...

/pdf/fitting-in-or-standing-out-the-tradeoffs-of-structural-and-19be8pyp6m.pdf

Amir Goldberg

Papers

Sociology in the Era of Big Data: The Ascent of Forensic Social Science

Fitting In or Standing Out? The Tradeoffs of Structural and Cultural Embeddedness

Neither ideologues nor agnostics: : alternative voters' belief system in an age of partisan politics

What Does It Mean to Span Cultural Boundaries? Variety and Atypicality in Cultural Consumption

Fitting In or Standing Out? The Tradeoffs of Structural and Cultural Embeddedness