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 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

This paper combines the concept of weak ties from social network research and the notion of complex knowledge to explain the role of weak ties in sharing knowledge across organization subunits in a...

The Search-Transfer Problem: The Role of Weak Ties in Sharing Knowledge across Organization Subunits.

L'A. etudie le lien entre capital social et developpement economique. Il analyse la notion de capital social et souligne que cette notion caracterise un reseau de relations sociales jouissant d'une certaine autonomie et d'un relatif enracinement dans la vie sociale. Il examine la place du capital social dans le cadre des politiques de developpement economique et met en lumiere un certain nombre de contraintes et de possibilites inherentes aux dilemmes propres aux strategies de developpement «bas-haut» et «haut-bas». Il envisage de facon critique les theories et les politiques concues en matiere de developpement

Social capital and economic development: Toward a theoretical synthesis and policy framework

This article explores the significance of status processes for generating and reproducing hierarchy among producers in a market. It develops a conception of a market as a status order in which each...

A Status-Based Model of Market Competition

This paper examines how the structure and content of individuals' networks on the job affect intraorganizational mobility. Consistent with prior research, we find that mobility is enhanced by having large, dense networks of informal ties for acquiring information and resources. However, studies of networks and organizational careers have overlooked the importance of informal ties in transmitting social identity and normative expectations within organizations, which is facilitated by networks with the opposite features: smaller size and greater density. We use this argument as the basis for developing a typology of network contents, and we document this interaction between network structure and content in analyses of mobility among employees of a high technology firm. We also show how the effects of tie duration on mobility vary across types of network ties. The implications of these findings for theory and research on networks and organizational mobility are discussed.

Resources and Relationships: Social Networks and Mobility in the Workplace

We examine how the structure and content of individuals' networks in the workplace affect intraorganizational mobility. Consistent with prior research, we find that an individual's mobility is enhanced by having a large, sparse network of informal ties for acquiring information and resources. However, in contrast to previous work, we emphasize the importance of consistent role expectations for performance and mobility. We find evidence that well-defined performance expectations are more likely to arise from a small, dense network of individuals. We develop a typology of network contents and document the interaction between network structure and content in analyses of mobility among employees of a high-technology firm. We also examine how the effects of tie duration on mobility vary by tie content. We discuss the implications of our results for theory and research on networks and organizational mobility.

Resources and relationships: Social networks and mobility in the workplace.

This article draws an analytical distinction between two types of market uncertainty: egocentric, which refers to a focal actor’s uncertainty regarding the best way to convert a set of inputs to an output desired by a potential exchange partner, and altercentric, which denotes the uncertainty confronted by a focal actor’s exchange partners regarding the quality of the output that the focal actor brings to the market. Given this distinction, the article considers how the value of “structural holes” and market status vary with these two types of uncertainty. The article proposes that the value of structural holes increases with egocentric uncertainty, but not with altercentric uncertainty. In contrast, the value of status increases with altercentric uncertainty, but declines with egocentric uncertainty. Thus actors with networks rich in structural holes should sort into markets or market segments that are high in egocentric uncertainty; high‐status actors should sort into markets that are low in egocentric ...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/323038

Networks as the Pipes and Prisms of the Market1

Initial sociological interest in network forms of organization was motivated in part by a critique of economic views of organization. Sociologists sought to highlight the prevalence and functionality of organizational forms that could not be classified as markets or hierarchies. As a result of this work, we now know that network forms of organization foster learning, represent a mechanism for the attainment of status or legitimacy, provide a variety of economic benefits, facilitate the management of resource dependencies, and provide considerable autonomy for employees. However, as sociologists move away from critiquing what are now somewhat outdated economic views, they need to balance the exclusive focus on prevalence and functionality with attention to constraint and dysfunctionality. The authors review work that has laid a foundation for this broader focus and suggest analytical concerns that should guide this literature as it moves forward.

Joel M. Podolny

Papers

A Status-Based Model of Market Competition

Resources and Relationships: Social Networks and Mobility in the Workplace

Resources and relationships: Social networks and mobility in the workplace.

Networks as the Pipes and Prisms of the Market1

Network Forms of Organization