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

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

Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave. Pp. viii, 282. £3·50, paperback £1. 1970. (Cambridge University Press.)

https://research.vu.nl/ws/files/87034982/1992_Ganzeboom_De_Graaf_Treiman_A_standard_international_socio_economic_index_of_occupational_status.pdf

A standard international socio-economic index of occupational status

The Political Consciousness of Post-Industrialism@@@The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics.

Relying on the top 100 pop songs from year-end charts, we coded more than 30,000 chart positions based on the country of origin of the artist and the language of performance, in nine Western countries. We estimated cross-national differences and trends since 1973, testing expectations on globalization as has been reviewed in the literature, where Americanization/Westernization, diversification, nationalization, and glocalization have been distinguished. Since the late 1980s, there has been an upward trend in the popularity of domestic artists, both when they perform in English or in their native language. Levels of globalization turn out to be positively related to the popularity of domestic artists singing in English. We also found evidence that when public opinion shows more pride in the nation, the chart success of artists performing in the domestic language is greater.

A Macro-Sociological Study into the Changes in the Popularity of Domestic, European, and American Pop Music in Western Countries

Familie-enquête Nederlandse Bevolking 1998

In this article we review 40 years of cross-national comparative research on the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic advantage, with particular attention to developments over the past 15 years-that is, since the transition between (what have become known as) the second and third generations of social stratification and mobility research. We identify the genera1During the preparation of this paper Ganzeboom held a Huygens Scholarship from the Netherlands' Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Sociology, University of California at Los Angeles.

/pdf/reprint-in-chinese-of-comparative-intergenerational-2q368ff4r7.pdf

reprint in Chinese of: Comparative intergenerational stratification research: three generations and beyond

Cultural Inequalities in Cross-national Perspective

In this study we determine the degree of educational homogamy for 65 countries. Next, we explain the differences in educational homogamy between these countries in terms of the level of development, political democracy, dominant religion and the cultural heritage from pre-industrial times. Between level of development and educational homogamy an inverse-U-curve relationship is found. Furthermore, dominant religion and the cultural heritage from pre-industrial time are found to be important explanatory variables. Catholic and Confucian countries show significantly more educational homogamy than Protestant countries, and industrializing horticultural societies show significantly less educational homogamy than industrializing agrarian countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]; Copyright of Mens en Maatschappij is the property of Amsterdam University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

/pdf/de-verklaring-van-verschillen-in-opleidingshomogamie-tussen-1rejsynce6.pdf

Wout Ultee

Papers

A Macro-Sociological Study into the Changes in the Popularity of Domestic, European, and American Pop Music in Western Countries

Familie-enquête Nederlandse Bevolking 1998

reprint in Chinese of: Comparative intergenerational stratification research: three generations and beyond

Cultural Inequalities in Cross-national Perspective

De verklaring van verschillen in opleidingshomogamie tussen 65 landen