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

Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

This study examines the relationship between use of Facebook, a popular online social network site, and the formation and maintenance of social capital. In addition to assessing bonding and bridging social capital, we explore a dimension of social capital that assesses one’s ability to stay connected with members of a previously inhabited community, which we call maintained social capital. Regression analyses conducted on results from a survey of undergraduate students (N = 286) suggest a strong association between use of Facebook and the three types of social capital, with the strongest relationship being to bridging social capital. In addition, Facebook usage was found to interact with measures of psychological well-being, suggesting that it might provide greater benefits for users experiencing low self-esteem and low life satisfaction.

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The Benefits of Facebook “Friends:” Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of interest in network research across the physical and social sciences. For social scientists, the theory of networks has been a gold mine, yielding explanations for social phenomena in a wide variety of disciplines from psychology to economics. Here, we review the kinds of things that social scientists have tried to explain using social network analysis and provide a nutshell description of the basic assumptions, goals, and explanatory mechanisms prevalent in the field. We hope to contribute to a dialogue among researchers from across the physical and social sciences who share a common interest in understanding the antecedents and consequences of network phenomena.

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Network Analysis in the Social Sciences

Crowdfunding allows founders of for-profit, artistic, and cultural ventures to fund their efforts by drawing on relatively small contributions from a relatively large number of individuals using the internet, without standard financial intermediaries. Drawing on a dataset of over 48,500 projects with combined funding over $237M, this paper offers a description of the underlying dynamics of success and failure among crowdfunded ventures. It suggests that personal networks and underlying project quality are associated with the success of crowdfunding efforts, and that geography is related to both the type of projects proposed and successful fundraising. Finally, I find that the vast majority of founders seem to fulfill their obligations to funders, but that over 75% deliver products later than expected, with the degree of delay predicted by the level and amount of funding a project receives. These results offer insight into the emerging phenomenon of crowdfunding, and also shed light more generally on the ways that the actions of founders may affect their ability to receive entrepreneurial financing.

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The Dynamics of Crowdfunding: Determinants of Success and Failure

We study network activities of entrepreneurs through three phases of establishing a firm in four countries. Entrepreneurs access people in their networks to discuss aspects of establishing and running a business. We find that entrepreneurs build networks that systematically vary by the phase of entrepreneurship, analyzing number of their discussion partners, and the time spent networking. Entrepreneurs talk with more people during the planning than other phases. Family members are present in their networks in all phases, particularly among those who took over an existing firm. However, women use their kin to a larger extent than men, and even more than men when they take over an existing firm. Experienced entrepreneurs have the same networking patterns as novices. Moreover, these networking patterns are the same in all countries. However, there are country differences in size of discussion networks and time spent networking.

Social Networks and Entrepreneurship

When computer networks link people as well as machines, they become social networks. Such computer-supported social networks (CSSNs) are becoming important bases of virtual communities, computer-supported cooperative work, and telework. Computer-mediated communication such as electronic mail and computerized conferencing is usually text-based and asynchronous. It has limited social presence, and on-line communications are often more uninhibited, creative, and blunt than in-person communication. Nevertheless, CSSNs sustain strong, intermediate, and weak ties that provide information and social support in both specialized and broadly based relationships. CSSNs foster virtual communities that are usually partial and narrowly focused, although some do become encompassing and broadly based. CSSNs accomplish a wide variety of cooperative work, connecting workers within and between organizations who are often physically dispersed. CSSNs also link teleworkers from their homes or remote work centers to main organi...

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Computer Networks as Social Networks: Collaborative Work, Telework, and Virtual Community

This paper analyzes how dual-career couples from the People's Republic of China (PRC) organize care for their children prior to and following immigration to Canada. Using the concepts of social capital and life course, we examine the problems that Chinese immigrant women face in rebuilding their professional careers due to loss of social capital. In the PRC, childcare is provided by a dense web of formal institutional and informal arrangements, with the family playing an important role. After immigrating, most need to rebuild their careers and develop social capital to help them combine childcare and career rebuilding. Women's careers suffer more than that of their husbands. Our data come from interviews with 50 PRC couples, aged in their 30s and 40s, with young children, who immigrated to Canada after 1996 in the skilled worker class.

Can women's social networks migrate?☆

Gendered structural barriers to job attainment for skilled Chinese emigrants in Canada

It is said that immigrants turn to entrepreneurship when, blocked from the mainstream, they can find a protected niche in the ethnic enclave. Canadian employers do not recognize the credentials of immigrant professional and technical workers. As a result, many turn to self employment. This paper studies entrepreneurship by a number of former professional and skilled new immigrants from China. We discuss the dynamics of starting a business in relation to the co-ethnic community. The data base for our paper is our ethnographic study of 50 PRC (People’s Republic of China) immigrant couples who ‘landed’ in Canada from 1996 to 2001. To date, 15 have tried self-employment. While several scholars have researched the processes of immigrant business start-ups, most describe densely networked ethnic communities. In contrast, these PRC newcomers are not embedded in the mainstream society; they lack roots in their co-ethnic communities. Neither are they part of a chain of people that arrive together. As pioneer immigrants, they consciously develop and build relations, on which their business efforts rest. Yet their connections are resource poor. We can learn much about the evolution of community and entrepreneurship from further study of PRC immigrants. They are rich in human capital, but poor in social relationships.

Janet W. Salaff

Papers

Social Networks and Entrepreneurship

Computer Networks as Social Networks: Collaborative Work, Telework, and Virtual Community

Can women's social networks migrate?☆

Gendered structural barriers to job attainment for skilled Chinese emigrants in Canada

Ethnic Entrepreneurship, Social Networks, and the Enclave