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

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.

Using data from the Eurobarometers, the association between the occupations of spouses is studied for 8 EC-countries at several points in time. Most of the association is attributable to consistency between spouses. The strength of this effect differs sonic-what between the countries, and decreases by about 17% between 1975 and 1989. A cohort-analysis shows this trend towards more openness to be a combined cohort- and age-effect. We also find a relationship between married womens' participation in paid employment and the occupational group in which her husband is working. The strength and pattern of this association differs somewhat between countries, but remains about the same in the period under investigation. [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.)

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Het verband tussen de beroepsposities van huwelijkspartners in acht landen van de Europese Gemeenschap 1975-1989

Beyond stratification and mobility: Dutch questions about openness, inequalities and cumulations

Herkomst en bestemming, vrijheden en de politiek; een terugblik

/pdf/de-schaduw-van-een-hand-joods-gojse-huwelijken-en-joodse-58si94e91j.pdf

De schaduw van een hand: Joods-gojse huwelijken en joodse zelfdoding in Nederland 1936-1943

Gay marriage after its introduction: supporters and objectors Sixty-five percent of the Dutch population disagrees largely or completely with the statement that gay marriage should be abolished, whereas sixteen percent agrees to it. In this article, we show which characteristics increase the likelihood to reject gay marriage. With information on family of origin, we show that the perception of mother’s attitude towards homosexuality during one’s youth strongly affects rejecting gay marriage. But the strongest determinant comes from socialization by ways of religious institutions. Here, attending religious services is more important than the distinction between various denominations. A lower education enhances particularly the chance to be neutral regarding abolishing gay marriage, whereas field of education has no effect. Moreover, we show that men and non-western immigrants have a larger likelihood to reject gay marriage.

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Wout Ultee

Papers

Het verband tussen de beroepsposities van huwelijkspartners in acht landen van de Europese Gemeenschap 1975-1989

Beyond stratification and mobility: Dutch questions about openness, inequalities and cumulations

Herkomst en bestemming, vrijheden en de politiek; een terugblik

De schaduw van een hand: Joods-gojse huwelijken en joodse zelfdoding in Nederland 1936-1943

Het homohuwelijk na invoering: voor- en tegenstanders