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.

Labour market transitions of husbands and wives in the Netherlands between 1980 and 1986. A contribution to the debate on the new underclass

The Life Course of the Low Educated in the Netherlands Since the 1950s

This article estimates for the Netherlands linear regression models for an individual’s level of education by bringing in parental as well as grandparental level of education. The prime question is that of the association between education in the first and third generation after holding constant education in the second generation. For the empirical analysis, we used the five available waves of the Family Survey Dutch Population as conducted in 1992-1993, 1998, 2000, 2003 and 2009. Since both primary respondents and their partner were interviewed about their father, mother and offspring, we could estimate statistical models in which the educational level of all grown-up children was regressed on the educational level of both parents and all four grandparents. The results show that grandfather’s level of education has a direct effect on his grandchild’s level of education, controlled for the educational level of one of the parents. In a model with both mother’s and father’s education, no longer a direct effect of grandfather’s education is found. This suggests that the direct effect of grandfather’s education has become indirect. Furthermore, the positive effect of grandfather’s education on his grandchild’s education declines as a function of parental education. In fact, only children with low educated parents profit from a high educated grandfather.

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Driegeneraties- en tweeoudersvragen over het opleidingsniveau van mannen en vrouwen in Nederland

By analysing examples, this paper makes three points about rational choice approaches within sociology. First, it is maintained that statistical techniques such as path diagrams and log-linear models are more suited to rational choice approaches than is apparent from rational choice criticisms of empirical social research. Secondly, it is held that the conditions under which the postulate that people act rationally is applied are more important than this postulate itself, and that there should be a shift from 'single decision, one good and two actors' to 'multiple decision, three actors and two goods' auxiliary assumptions. Thirdly, it is argued that rational choice approaches pay insufficient attention to the questions they should address and that the sociological tradition might furnish questions leading to exemplars which turn rational choice approaches into a progressive sociological paradigm.

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Wout Ultee

Papers

Labour market transitions of husbands and wives in the Netherlands between 1980 and 1986. A contribution to the debate on the new underclass

The Life Course of the Low Educated in the Netherlands Since the 1950s

Driegeneraties- en tweeoudersvragen over het opleidingsniveau van mannen en vrouwen in Nederland

Do rational choice approaches have problems

De sociale segmentatie van Nederland in 2015