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.

Stratification, distinction and

Hans Righart's De eindeloze jaren zestig: Geschiedenis van een generatie-conflict ([The Endless Sixties: History of a Generation Conflict] 1995) & James C. Kennedy's Nieuw Babylon in aanbouw: Nederland in de jaren zestig ([Building New Babylon: The Netherlands in the Sixties] 1995) are reviewed, focusing on questions asked, explanations rejected, theories used, & compliance with sociological methodology. It is held that Kennedy's account is exceedingly rhetorical & may have been more convincing if similar ideas from Max Weber's interpretative sociology had been incorporated. Righart's explanation would have gained explanatory power if a distinction had been made between the goods market & government-supplied goods & if the attitudes caused by the government's inadequate supply of housing & pop music had been recognized. Subsequently, an attempt is made to reconcile Kennedy's & Righart's explanations in a technological-ideological evolutionary approach in which technological development is related to increasing activism; the Netherlands' eventual yielding to an expensive activist worldview is attributed to the unexpected finding of a huge natural gas deposit. International aspects are discussed briefly. 14 References. Adapted from the source document.

https://rjh.ub.rug.nl/sogi/article/download/19508/16986

Eindeloos praten in vele tongen over het Nederlandse experiment

In this chapter, the author is concerned with the relation between theory and research in sociology, and in particular with the interplay of various rational choice approaches and the statistical results of empirical social investigations , he apply rational action theory to quantitative analysis of large-scale data-sets-findings on Dutch society. The question on Dutch society, its political parties and the percentage of the vote for confessional parties received an answer attesting to a high plateau of pillarization until the mid 1960s, and a drop afterwards. The Dutch government granted hardly any welfare, adhered to a law that old people without sufficient means had to be taken care of by their children, and supported the administration of welfare by the churches. For the various Dutch municipalities, lists have been preserved with the name, place and date of birth of the Jews who lived there in 1941 or 1942.

Bringing individuals back into sociology: Three aspects of cohesion in Dutch society during the 20th century

Bonger revisited. On a false start and a sudden full speed ahead in Dutch sociology Our tentative hypothesis is that institutionalization of an academic discipline, for example by way of university chairs and disciplinary training schools, contributes to scientific progress. Yet, although Bonger contributed to all of sociology’s three main problems (cohesion, inequality and rationalization), his appointment as the first professor for sociology in the Netherlands, did not make for a successful take off. Institutions also have unintended negative consequences. Bonger remained isolated, the 1921 Academic Statute only allowed him to teach minor subjects (criminology and sociology), and he hardly attracted major students. Moreover, Dutch sociology suffered badly in WOII, losing, among other scholars, Bonger. A change in the Academic Statute after WOII led to nine disciplinary training schools at existing universities, and to 12 professorships in sociology. Of the newly appointed professors, only Kruijt and Van Heek developed a successful research programme driven by one main question broken down into several sub questions. In the decades after them, Lammers, focusing on human organizations, formulated two groups of related questions that contributed to the growth of sociological knowledge. 

Wout Ultee

Papers

Stratification, distinction and

Eindeloos praten in vele tongen over het Nederlandse experiment

Bringing individuals back into sociology: Three aspects of cohesion in Dutch society during the 20th century

Terug naar Bonger

Mobility, Intergenerational and intragenerational