It is hypothesized that collective efficacy, defined as social cohesion among neighbors combined with their willingness to intervene on behalf of the common good, is linked to reduced violence. This hypothesis was tested on a 1995 survey of 8782 residents of 343 neighborhoods in Chicago, Illinois. Multilevel analyses showed that a measure of collective efficacy yields a high between-neighborhood reliability and is negatively associated with variations in violence, when individual-level characteristics, measurement error, and prior violence are controlled. Associations of concentrated disadvantage and residential instability with violence are largely mediated by collective efficacy.

Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy

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

Exploring the factors that explain the choice of governance structures in interfirm alliances, this study challenges the use of a singular emphasis on transaction costs. Such an approach erroneously treats each transaction as independent and ignores the role of interfirm trust that emerges from repeated alliances between the same partners. Comprehensive multiindustry data on alliances made between 1970 and 1989 support the importance of such trust. Although support emerged for the transaction cost claim that alliances that encompass shared research and development are likely to be equity based, there is also strong evidence that repeated alliances between two partners are less likely than other alliances to be organized using equity.

Does Familiarity Breed Trust? The Implications of Repeated Ties for Contractual Choice in Alliances

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

This article outlines the mechanism by which brokerage provides social capital. Opinion and behavior are more homogeneous within than between groups, so people connected across groups are more familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving. Brokerage across the structural holes between groups provides a vision of options otherwise unseen, which is the mechanism by which brokerage becomes social capital. I review evidence consistent with the hypothesis, then look at the networks around managers in a large American electronics company. The organization is rife with structural holes, and brokerage has its expected correlates. Compensation, positive performance evaluations, promotions, and good ideas are disproportionately in the hands of people whose networks span structural holes. The between-group brokers are more likely to express ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to have ideas evaluated as valuable. I close with implications for creativity and structural change.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1086/421787.pdf

Structural Holes and Good Ideas.

This article argues that racial segregation is crucial to explaining the emergence of the urban underclass during the 1970s. A strong interaction between rising rates of poverty and high levels of residential segregation explains where, why and in which groups the underclass arose. This argument is developed with simulations that replicate the economic conditions observed among blacks and whites in metropolitan areas during the 1970s but assume different conditions of racial and class segregation. These data show how a simple increase in the rate of minority poverty leads to a dramatic rise in the concentration of poverty when it occurs within a racially segregated city. Increases in poverty concentration are, in turn, associated with other changes in the socioeconomic character of neighborhoods, transforming them into physically deteriorated areas of high crime, poor schools, and excessive mortality where welfare-dependent, female-headed families are the norm. Thus, policies to solve the socioeconomic pr...

American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass.

The concept of brokerage has gained considerable attention in recent years, but few researchers have attempted to specify what the phenomenon is. In this paper, we develop a theoretical conception of brokerage behavior in social systems characterized by the exchange or flow of resources. Building on the idea that any set of actors can be partitioned in a meaningful way into a set of mutually exclusive subgroups, we show that such a partition generates five formally, analytically, and intuitively distinct brokerage types or roles. We construct quantitative measures of each of these five types for actors in social networks and for whole systems, and show that statistical inference can be used to test whether occupancy of a brokerage position is the product of a random distribution of exchange relations or the product of underlying social structure.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/270949.pdf

Structures of Mediation : A Formal Approach to Brokerage in Transaction Networks

This article argues that a common organizational practice-the hiring of new workers via employee referrals-provides key insights into the notion of social capital. Employers who use such hiring methods are quintessential "social capitalists," viewing workers' social connections as resources in which they can invest in order to gain economic returns in the form of better hiring outcomes. Identified are three ways through which such returns might be realized: the "richer pool," the "better match," and the "social enrichment" mechanisms. Using unique company data on the dollar costs of screening, hiring, and training, this article finds that the firm's investment in the social capital of its employees yields significant economic returns.

Social Capital at Work: Networks and Employment at a Phone Center

Using unique data from a large retail bank, the authors investigate the theoretical mechanisms by which preexisting social ties affect the hiring process. By focusing on a single, large employer they are able to identify the recruitment practices and hiring criteria used during screening for entry-level positions. This method allows them to assemble data for the pool of candidates at multiple phases of the hiring process and to conduct empirical tests of the various roles that personal contacts might play at each stage. Because they are able to treat hiring as a process, rather than as an event, they can also consider the possible selection biases introduced by the multistage screening process. More specifically, they study how employee referral (i.e., being recommended by a current bank employee) affects an applicant's success at multiple stages of the recruitment process, and they examine the cumulative effects of referral status on the chance of being offered a job. Results of probit models indicate that, controlling for other factors, referrals have advantages at both the interview and job-offer stages compared to external nonreferral applicants. Consistent with theoretical arguments that referrals are prescreened by current employees, their results show that referral applicants present more appropriate resumes than do nonreferral applicants. Referral applicants also are more likely than nonreferrals to apply when market conditions are more favorable. Nevertheless, resume quality and application timing cannot explain referrals' advantage at the interview and hire phases. They discuss the theoretical implications of these findings

Sifting and sorting : Personal contacts and hiring in a retail bank

This article shows that occupancy of brokerage positions in the U.S. health policy domain's communication network is a crucial determinant of influence. However, the ability to convert structural position into power is contingent on the type of brokerage position occupied and whether the actor is a government organization. In the government sector, actors in representative positions are more influential to the extent that they take public stands on events, whereas liaison and itinerant positions only confer influence if their occupants remain impartial. The article concludess that the influence of government organizations is contingent on their capacity to link disparate actors in the communication network while remaining uncommitted to specific policy agendas.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/2782581

Roberto M. Fernandez

Papers

American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass.

Structures of Mediation : A Formal Approach to Brokerage in Transaction Networks

Social Capital at Work: Networks and Employment at a Phone Center

Sifting and sorting : Personal contacts and hiring in a retail bank

A Dilemma of State Power: Brokerage and Influence in the National Health Policy Domain