No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
The Persistence and Transformation of Community: From Neighbourhood Groups to Social Networks
Abstract
this report is that community has become embedded in social networks rather than groups. As part of this transformation, there has been a movement of community relationships from easily observed public spaces to less-accessible private homes
... In his research of social networks and communities, Barry Wellman found that nostalgic definitions of "tightly-bounded, densely-knit groups of broadly based ties" rarely exist. Instead his research showed that contemporary Western communities "are usually loosely-bounded, sparsely-knit, ramifying networks of specialized ties", and therefore more networks and social groups like online communities would fall under the classification of community and social network (Wellman, 2001). No matter the precise definition, current meaning need to focus on the abstention of the necessity of geographic proximity as the same foundational necessities that can still meet through the virtual realm. ...
... Following this study a flux of scholarship emerged that examined all aspects of online communities, like the affect on offline community existence and whether or not it decreases offline, "real-world" (Nie, 2001;Nie et al., 2002;Wellman & Quan-Haase, 2004). Research has also focused on the transformations of offline community through the establishment of interest-based communities (Barlow et al., 1995;Wellman 2001;Wellman & Quan-Haase, 2004), or the supplementations of offline communities through the opportunity for various new media communication in (Wellman & Gulia, 1997;Wellman, 2001;Wellman & Quan-Haase, 2004). What also resulted during this time was a healthy debate that framed computer-mediated communication (CMC) in general, and online communities specifically (Bimber, 1998;Jones, 1995;J. ...
... Following this study a flux of scholarship emerged that examined all aspects of online communities, like the affect on offline community existence and whether or not it decreases offline, "real-world" (Nie, 2001;Nie et al., 2002;Wellman & Quan-Haase, 2004). Research has also focused on the transformations of offline community through the establishment of interest-based communities (Barlow et al., 1995;Wellman 2001;Wellman & Quan-Haase, 2004), or the supplementations of offline communities through the opportunity for various new media communication in (Wellman & Gulia, 1997;Wellman, 2001;Wellman & Quan-Haase, 2004). What also resulted during this time was a healthy debate that framed computer-mediated communication (CMC) in general, and online communities specifically (Bimber, 1998;Jones, 1995;J. ...
This thesis applies Anderson and Meyer's (1988) theory of social action media studies to examine whether social action occurs offline as a result of controversial topics discussed in online communities. One example of this is the blog PostSecret.blogspot.com. PostSecret is an Internet blog that encourages viewers around the world to mail in personal secrets in the form of a postcard for online posting. The blog potentially supports the development of social action through its allowance for open discussion of controversial and socially taboo topics. A hybrid media analysis will incorporate an ethnographic study, online discussion forum and semiotic analysis. Currently, the communication field has extensive scholarship regarding online community building, the impact of such on local community building, online community communication methods and other facets of online communities; however there remains limited scholarship on the offline actions that occur in response to controversial or socially taboo discussions that develop within online communities.
... The conventional way of looking at communities is to define them as spatially bounded groups. In that sense, a village or a neighbourhood is seen to form a community because people who live close to each often make use of the same facilities and share an interest in local issues (Wellman, 2001a;Hopkins et al., 2004;Chua et al., 2011). However, as many researchers (e.g., Baker & Ward, 2002;Blanchard & Markus, 2002) point out, place-based groupings do not always form a community, so a broader definition of the concept community is needed. ...
... The focal idea in late modern communities is that they are temporary, loosely organised entities based on shared emotions, lifestyles, or consumption practices (Blackshaw, 2010;Cova, 1997). An individual may belong to several communities without being particularly attached to any of them (Wellman, 2001a). Attachment to multiple, even conflicting communities is possible through different roles; in forming communal connections with others, people often bring out a specific value, ability, or part of themselves, but not the whole person (Wellman, 2001a). ...
... An individual may belong to several communities without being particularly attached to any of them (Wellman, 2001a). Attachment to multiple, even conflicting communities is possible through different roles; in forming communal connections with others, people often bring out a specific value, ability, or part of themselves, but not the whole person (Wellman, 2001a). Late modern communities enable an individual to construct a temporary identity that may dissolve once they leave the community (Maffesoli, 1995;Bauman, 2004). ...
... Como espacio absoluto el barrio limita la forma y el alcance de las relaciones vecinales. Acota su espacialidad en torno a una lógica de proximidad restringida, anclada en lo residencial y da primacía a los vínculos fuertes en desmedro de los vínculos débiles (Wellman, 1979(Wellman, , 2001. El ideal de comunidad niega la diferencia que se presenta bajo la forma del distanciamiento temporal y espacial que caracteriza los procesos sociales (Young, 2000). ...
... El ideal de comunidad niega la diferencia que se presenta bajo la forma del distanciamiento temporal y espacial que caracteriza los procesos sociales (Young, 2000). La "comunidad", contenido del barrio, queda consagrada como único código de trabajo para la cohesión (Suttles, 1972;Wellman, 2001). ...
... A diferencia de lo que sostiene la concepción neo ecológica de barrio, para muchos autores lo más propio de lo vecinal no es su delimitación física ni su forma urbana, sino las relaciones, estrategias y prácticas de vecindad (Hunter, 1979;Jacobs, 1961;Keller, 1979;Madden, 2014;Massey, (2014) ;Suttles, 1972;Wellman, 1979;Rodríguez, 2008;Wellman, 2001). Su contenido es definido por las propias relaciones, los usos, las necesidades y las estrategias de los sujetos. ...
En los últimos treinta años los programas de intervención comunitaria en Chile han establecido una total equivalencia entre relaciones vecinales, comunidad y escala barrial. Pese a algunos resultados positivos en la regeneración del vínculo social, el aporte de estas intervenciones en la construcción de una ciudadanía urbana ha sido menor. Los barrios-comunidades no incrementan su poder para incidir en procesos de gobernanza urbana. Lo anterior es producto de una concepción encapsulada de las relaciones vecinales en espacios-lugares limitados, que inhibe la construcción de redes urbanas y de escalamientos territoriales más amplios. Frente a esto se propone la idea de Geografías Vecinales: múltiples espacialidades, escalas y formas de organización que puede adoptar el habitar urbano. Aquí lo vecinal se entiende como un ámbito de posibilidades de acción: capaz de constituir nuevas configuraciones relacionales y creadoras de sus propias geografías. A través de la revisión de dos casos observamos los desafíos y posibilidades que esta aproximación abre a las metodologías de intervención comunitaria, entre ellos, problematizar y desnaturalizar los límites impuestos al habitar urbano, acompañando a las comunidades de vecinos para redibujar sus geografías y, a partir de ello, replantearse sus problemáticas y modalidades de acción.
... Como espacio absoluto el barrio limita la forma y el alcance de las relaciones vecinales. Acota su espacialidad en torno a una lógica de proximidad restringida, anclada en lo residencial y da primacía a los vínculos fuertes en desmedro de los vínculos débiles (Wellman, 1979(Wellman, , 2001. El ideal de comunidad niega la diferencia que se presenta bajo la forma del distanciamiento temporal y espacial que caracteriza los procesos sociales (Young, 2000). ...
... El ideal de comunidad niega la diferencia que se presenta bajo la forma del distanciamiento temporal y espacial que caracteriza los procesos sociales (Young, 2000). La "comunidad", contenido del barrio, queda consagrada como único código de trabajo para la cohesión (Suttles, 1972;Wellman, 2001). ...
... A diferencia de lo que sostiene la concepción neo ecológica de barrio, para muchos autores lo más propio de lo vecinal no es su delimitación física ni su forma urbana, sino las relaciones, estrategias y prácticas de vecindad (Hunter, 1979;Jacobs, 1961;Keller, 1979;Madden, 2014;Massey, (2014) ;Suttles, 1972;Wellman, 1979;Rodríguez, 2008;Wellman, 2001). Su contenido es definido por las propias relaciones, los usos, las necesidades y las estrategias de los sujetos. ...
En los últimos treinta años los programas de intervención comunitaria en Chile han establecido una total equivalencia entre relaciones vecinales, comunidad y escala barrial. Pese a algunos resultados positivos en la regeneración del vínculo social, el aporte de estas intervenciones en la construcción de una ciudadanía urbana ha sido menor. Los barrios-comunidades no incrementan su poder para incidir en procesos de gobernanza urbana. Lo anterior es producto de una concepción encapsulada de las relaciones vecinales en espacios-lugares limitados, que inhibe la construcción de redes urbanas y de escalamientos territoriales más amplios. Frente a esto se propone la idea de Geografías Vecinales: múltiples espacialidades, escalas y formas de organización que puede adoptar el habitar urbano. Aquí lo vecinal se entiende como un ámbito de posibilidades de acción: capaz de constituir nuevas configuraciones relacionales y creadoras de sus propias geografías. A través de la revisión de dos casos observamos los desafíos y posibilidades que esta aproximación abre a las metodologías de intervención comunitaria, entre ellos, problematizar y desnaturalizar los límites impuestos al habitar urbano, acompañando a las comunidades de vecinos para redibujar sus geografías y, a partir de ello, replantearse sus problemáticas y modalidades de acción.
... O termo comunidade, que surge de forma recorrente em todos estes estudos, remonta à distinção operada por Tonnies e Weber entre Gemmeinschaft e Gesellschaft, ou antes, comunidade e sociedade. Segundo estes, as relações próprias da comunidade baseiam-se em sentimentos e tradições que ligam famílias e pessoas da vizinhança umas às outras, ao contrário das relações de sociedade, que se apoiam em ligações racionais por interesses ou objectivos comuns (Bryk & Driscoll, 1988;Wellman, 2001). Assim, as relações da comunidade são consideradas como relativamente densas, coesas e confinadas a um território 12 , além de serem idealizadas não só pela proximidade dos seus membros como também pelos benefícios que dela derivam, como as relações interpessoais de sociabilidade, suporte e informação, valores, normas e interesses comuns (Wellman, 2001). ...
... Segundo estes, as relações próprias da comunidade baseiam-se em sentimentos e tradições que ligam famílias e pessoas da vizinhança umas às outras, ao contrário das relações de sociedade, que se apoiam em ligações racionais por interesses ou objectivos comuns (Bryk & Driscoll, 1988;Wellman, 2001). Assim, as relações da comunidade são consideradas como relativamente densas, coesas e confinadas a um território 12 , além de serem idealizadas não só pela proximidade dos seus membros como também pelos benefícios que dela derivam, como as relações interpessoais de sociabilidade, suporte e informação, valores, normas e interesses comuns (Wellman, 2001). ...
... necessidades da instituição e dos recursos existentes na comunidade para os satisfazer. O objectivo é então perceber como se podem estabelecer ligações com diversos parceiros 23 e capitalizar os recursos, informações, capacidades, "know-how" provenientes dessas relações, reduzindo desta forma esforços "duplicados" e formando uma comunidade de interesses (Wellman, 2001). O estabelecimento de parcerias com instituições da comunidade desenvolve-se, desta forma, segundo a lógica das redes se considerarmos que os recursos presentes nos nós da rede -como as capacidades e habilidade dos vários actores da rede (em suma, o seu capital humano) -só estão disponíveis para os restantes actores com o estabelecimento e manutenção de laços entre estes (cf complementaridade entre capital humano e capital social) 24 . ...
... Jedną z kwestii podnoszonych przez badaczy w literaturze obcojęzycznej jest wieloznaczność angielskich, z pozoru różnych, określeń "sąsiedztwo" (neigbourhood) oraz "społeczność" (community) (Crow, Allan 1994, Brower 2000, Wellman 2001a). Zanim zostanie przedyskutowana kwestia definicji "sąsiedztwa", wydaje się zatem zasadne odniesienie do obu terminów oraz zaprezentowanie poglądów uczo nych na temat różnic i podobieństw obu pojęć (por. ...
... Autorzy zwracają uwagę, iż coraz częściej spotykanymi formami społeczności są "społeczności uwolnienia", w których przeważają więzi społeczne pozasąsiedzkie, a sąsiedzkie schodzą na plan dalszy lub zupełnie przestają odgrywać istotną rolę w życiu społecznym (Wellman 1992(Wellman , 1996(Wellman , 1997(Wellman , 2001a. Udział w jednej, solidarnej i zintegrowanej społeczności, bazującej na przynależności do wspólne go terytorium, zostaje zastąpiony uczestnictwem w wielu grupach, kręgach towa rzyskich oraz stowarzyszeniach. ...
... Nowe spojrzenie na strukturę oraz zasady funkcjonowania "społeczności osobistych" wprowadza powszechne użytkowanie Internetu. Cyberspołeczności tworzone na bazie list dyskusyjnych, komunikatorów i przeróżnych forów inter netowych poszerzają możliwości tworzenia "społeczności osobistych" na bazie relacji nawiązywanych i utrzymywanych on-line (Wellman 2001b). Co ważne, społeczności powstające pod wpływem kontaktów internetowych mają więk szość cech pozwalających członkom tej społeczności czuć się społecznie upodmiotowionymi (Smith, Kollock 1999, Hillis 2005, Morley 2005). ...
Summary: Nature of neighbourhoods in big city. Analyse of sub-neighbourhood and neighbourhood territorial social subsystems in Poznań
The neighbourhood can define the social roots of life, determine our current lifestyle and decide our future, define social identity, be an arena in which an individual learns social activity and attains civil maturity, and finally be an important source of a life force. Naturally, the neighbourhood can equally mean conflicts, exclusion, social deviance or isolation, and an escalation of anonymity and disembedding. There is no doubt that neighbourhood means spatial proximity, but not all spatial proximity ends with social nearness. What is the nature of big-city neighbourhoods in Polish conditions? This is the chief question underlying the considerations presented in this publication.
Are present-day inhabitants of a big Polish city strongly attached to their neighbourhoods, and are neighbourhood units a basis for the city's harmonious growth? Doorplates with family names tend to disappear from entrance doors, and door entry phone systems tend to display numbers of flats rather than the names of people living in them. Does it mean that a neighbourhood is phasing out from the social stratum and that modern man is withdrawing to his dwelling to protect his individuality there?
The transformations taking place in the structures of a big city justify, or rather demand, a research intended to identify modern forms of neighbourhood life and describe the specificity of neighbourhood subsystems in a big city and their level of integration.
This aim will be approached in both, theoretical and empirical terms. In the theoretical approach, the author intends to give an overview of the conceptions and views about neighbourhood and to embed neighbourhood issues in the conception of a territorial social system. In the empirical part, the neighbourhood question will be presented on the example of Poznań. The analyses of the territorial and social layer of the neighbourhood reveal the modern nature of Poznań neighbourhoods that developed in the last century and at the start of the next. The issues addressed include the degree of territorial closure and current condition of neighbourhoods, social relations holding in neighbourhoods with different building patterns, and chances of neighbourhoods to be supported by selected organisational structures. For analytical and reporting purposes, the different theoretical approaches to neighbourhood were classified into content-related groups, each with a carefully preserved chief, distinct and original thought of its authors. In a few cases the neighbourhood was merely a background for reflections on other questions, e.g. the organisation of a neighbourhood unit, identification of areas of concentration of residents with similar social profiles (lifestyle clusters or neighbourhood clusters), or identification of modern lifestyles of the middle class in gentrified inner-city areas. Still, even in those cases the scholars offer, even if indirectly, certain perspectives in which to view the
key topic of this dissertation. Thus, nine perspectives were distinguished which rely on different understandings of the neighbourhood focusing on:
• the function of an urban neighbourhood unit,
• the essence of the street in a neighbourhood and a community centred on the neighbourhood street,
• the function of traditional, social and psychological, contacts,
• the role of spatially defined neighbourhood clusters,
• the role of an inner gradation of the neighbourhood: from a single block of flats to the entire estate,
• changes in the traditional neighbourhood due to a growing importance of extraneighbourhood social networks,
• an increasing tendency towards closure and social isolation in neighbourhoods,
• the appearance of neighbourhoods defined by new lifestyles, especially those presented by the middle class, and
• the transformation of neighbourhoods in successive development stages.
A survey of the literature on the subject leads to the conclusion that in formulating the basic theoretical assumptions that would allow an exhaustive treatment of the neighbourhood question one should consider:
• the territorial aspect of the neighbourhood,
• its social aspect,
• its institutional aspect, and
• the aspect of the internal dynamics and structural (systemic) diversity of the neighbourhood.
In an attempt to work out a general conception describing the neighbourhood and meeting the above requirements, the neighbourhood communities are treated as structures making up subsystems of a city and constituting the city system. Thus, a systems perspective is adopted in the dissertation which is intended to assist in sorting out the issues addressed, and in particular in identifying the problem questions fully.
A neighbourhood is understood in the dissertation as a territorially defined social system of various types of relations holding among its inhabitants and institutional influences shaping external relations. It is a system based on the proximity of habitation which is rarely fully disintegrated or fully integrated. The degree of its integration is determined by a variety of systemic relations and territorial marking.
Within the territorial social system of a city, the following subsystems can be distinguished:
• sub-neighbourhood,
• neighbourhood, and
• sublocal.
Each of the social layers of the above territorial subsystems can in fact appear as:
• a sub-neighbourhood community,
• a neighbourhood community,
• a local community, and
• an urban society.
The following internal relations can be listed that help to characterise social subsystems on a scale of their integration-disintegration:
• isolation,
• co-existence, and
• co-operation.
External relations hold among the communities of the individual subsystems and can be those of subordination, equality or superiority. In practice, external relations are supported, more or less explicitly, by the institutional-administrative endowment of the particular subsystems. They are the relations of:
- withdrawal,
- interest, or
- involvement.
Territoriality is also described through the attitude of the particular communities and their
members towards the area used. Those attitudes include:
- negation,
- neutrality, or
- belonging.
Observations about modern big-city neighbourhoods that can be formulated on the basis of the research are as follows:
1. In territorial terms, old neighbourhoods tend to deteriorate slowly while most of the new
ones are being built in isolation from the surroundings from the start.
2. Institutions and places which used to be the hubs of neighbourhood life have disappeared or are in decline, including:
a. the caretaker, who was not only a person sweeping the yard, but also the carrier of many
other functions: integrative, communicative, organisational, and social control; and
b. the mangle and the washroom.
3. There are still such places as the local shop or service (e.g. a hairdresser's), but their function has been changing into purely utilitarian. Some of them have moved out of the neighbourhood.
4. There has appeared the phenomenon of e-neighbourhood and the integration of a group of residents through participation in neighbourhood discussion forums.
5. In new neighbourhoods excessive weight is given to security forces guarding the buildings, treated as a panacea for all the detrimental phenomena taking place in the neighbourhood.
6. The majority of respondents living in open housing complexes do not want their
neighbourhoods to be fenced off, but only monitored or placed under discreet surveillance. This shows that the persons concerned can see the difference between the feeling of safety and a merely physical sense of isolation.
7. The analysis and theoretical considerations presented above indicate that neighbourhoods should possess a territorial character of their own; they should be distinct, but not isolated.
8. The lifestyle of a city dweller tends to change: everyday life is faster and often lived outside the neighbourhood, at work and in a circle of friends from other parts of the city.
9. There is growing animation on the secondary market in dwellings, which does not favour long-term residency and the formation of ties. A number of flats are being let to students.
10. Institutional and organisational support for neighbourhoods should provide a basis for social activity and be a catalyst of the dormant potential of neighbourhood communities. The present research shows that a majority of residents are ready for pro-neighbourhood action, having a favourable image of a neighbour and expectations concerning him. Thus, institutions and organisations can encourage and stimulate this social capital, with primary schools and parishes having the greatest potential in this matter. However, this potential is practically left untapped. External links of neighbourhoods are still weak. Neighbourhoods find no support on the part of institutions assisting residents in their activity.
11. The residents showing greater interest in neighbourhood life are those who are older, have a lower education, children, and have lived in the same place for a longer time.
12. In the Poznań conditions, neighbourhood areas showing a special type of building pattern can be categorised in terms of increasing neighbourhood integration as follows (starting with the least integrated neighbourhoods):
a. new housing complexes,
b. old municipal tenement houses,
c. blocks-of-flats of the socialist city, and
d. single-family housing estates.
Today the mangle that used to be a meeting place for the women of a neighbourhood has disappeared, as has the caretaker who was an integrator of social life and the sandpit which was the focus of life for the younger residents. In the contemporary neighbourhood one can observe a reflection of both, global changes and microstructural influences. Still, despite those factors the social nature of man remains the same. Man keeps being a social creature seeking selfactualisation in social structures that are emotionally and spatially close to him. Hence, neighbourhood subsystems are among the basic and real socio-spatial categories of the city.
... L'idea alla base della combinazione tra EHA ed SNA nasce quindi da due principali osservazioni. Da una parte, ci sembra indiscutibile che il vissuto personale ed individuale compiuto dall'attore nel corso della sua vita non può non lasciare traccia di sé nella configurazione delle relazioni con i terzi; dall'altra, un approccio euristico fondato sulla metafora di una vita sociale intesa in termini relazionali permette senza dubbio di studiare una serie di aspetti che le tradizionali surveys non sono in grado di cogliere (Burt, 1992;Wellman, 1979Wellman, , 1982Wellman, , 1990Wellman, , 2001Wellman, e 2007. Il protocollo seguito in studi di questo tipo sembra infatti produrre risultati frammentati ed incompleti, perché quando l'obiettivo è quello di studiare fenomeni intrinsecamente relazionali, quale ad esempio è l'amicizia, esso equivale a «mettere della materia viva in una centrifuga: ne usciranno molecole chimiche isolate, ma la struttura andrà persa» (Collins, 1988;tr. ...
... Inoltre, grazie ad una semplice stratificazione del campione, così come è stato fatto nella parte empirica di questo lavoro, sarà possibile apprezzare l'influenza relativa di altre variabili, quali ad esem-pio quelle tese a descrivere la configurazione strutturale dei reticoli in cui sono immersi i soggetti che sono a rischio o che già sono in condizione di povertà. In questo modo, si può comprendere come cambia la capacità dell'individuo di far fronte ad una situazione di disagio economico in base alle caratteristiche strutturali del reticolo relazionale, il quale può essere determinante ad esempio perché foriero di informazioni che facilitano l'ottenimento di un posto di lavoro (Granovetter, 1973) e/o perché offre un supporto morale e/o materiale di parenti e/o amici (Wellman, 2001). ...
... This ideal of 'community' denies the complexity derived from the temporal and spatial frames that characterise social processes (Young, 2000). The community thus contained inside the neighbourhood would be the only working force of cohesion (Suttles, 1972;Wellman, 2001). Space is hereby commonly conceived as independent from forces, institutions and policies that (re)create it (Lefebvre, 2013;Madden, 2014). ...
... In contrast to this rigid conceptualisation, we adopt a relational notion, whereby the neighbourhood is what neighbours do -their relationships and networks - (Rodríguez, 2008;Wellman, 2001). The neighbourhood only exists after the relationships that are established within it and to/from it and is transformed by the links, networks and flows that it maintains within and with other spaces at different scales (Massey, 2012). ...
This article proposes a critical and complex reading of the configuration and reconfiguration of the neighbourhood (barrio) based on a comparative analysis of two case studies in Spain and Chile. Neighbourhood life is assumed to be organised around complex, open and dynamic relationships articulated in different relational geographies and not limited to a restricted space-time frame. We propose the concept of ‘relational neighbourhood geographies’, understanding it as an expansive and malleable socio-spatial field. In both case studies we observe that relational neighbourhood geographies exist beyond the limits of geographically narrow territories and can be expanded by constructing new geographies and territorialities. Consequently, the configuration of the neighbourhood is relationally conditioned by the forms and dynamics that weak and strong ties adopt in given spaces and times. The historical analysis of our case studies shows ways in which relationality is context-sensitive and how bottom-up resistance produces relationality. Although the importance of the relational is observed in both cases, their characterisation, intensity and complexity are different, which creates distinct capacities to produce territorialities and engage and impact city politics.
... The focal idea in late modern communities is that they are temporary, loosely organized entities based on shared emotions, lifestyles, or consumption practices (Blackshaw, 2010;Cova, 1997). An individual may belong to several communities without being particularly attached to any of them (Wellman, 2001). Attachment to multiple, even conflicting communities is possible through different roles; in forming communal connections with others, people often bring out a specific value, ability, or part of themselves, but not the whole person (Wellman, 2001). ...
... An individual may belong to several communities without being particularly attached to any of them (Wellman, 2001). Attachment to multiple, even conflicting communities is possible through different roles; in forming communal connections with others, people often bring out a specific value, ability, or part of themselves, but not the whole person (Wellman, 2001). Late modern communities enable an individual to construct a temporary identity that may dissolve once they leave the community (Bauman, 2004;Maffesoli, 1995). ...
Participation in leisure sports is undergoing a transformation that is guided by societal and cultural changes as well as recent developments in, and the use of, digital sports media and technologies. This paper discusses how changes in leisure sports participation can be understood using mediatization as a theoretical framework. This theoretically informed analysis of change is contextualized within Finnish climbing and trail running subcultures. The paper proposes that mediatization contributes to the diversification of the sporting landscape, enables fluidity in sports communities, and strengthens commercialization of leisure sports. Additionally, the paper outlines how the dynamics of de- and reinstitutionalization of leisure sports are connected to the rise of digital media and communication.
... El ideal de comunidad niega la diferencia que se presenta bajo la forma del distanciamiento temporal y espacial que caracteriza los procesos sociales (Young, 2000, p. 380). La "comunidad", contenido del barrio, queda consagrada como único código de trabajo para la cohesión (Suttles, 1972;Wellman, 2001). ...
... A fines de los años 1970, Susane Keller (1979) concluyó que lo más propio de los vecindarios no es su delimitación física ni su forma urbana, sino las relaciones y prácticas de vecindad. Lo vecinal sería ante todo expresión de lo que hacen los vecinos en tanto tales, las relaciones y redes que construyen (Rodríguez, 2008;Wellman, 2001). Así, el espacio (vecinal) solo existiría en función de las relaciones que se desarrollan en él (Harvey, 2012) y se construye (y transforma) en virtud de los vínculos, redes y flujos que establece con distintas escalas (Massey, 2012). ...
La concepción neoecológica de barrio fue adoptada en los años 1980 por diversos gobiernos de Europa en el marco de la agenda neoliberal. Asumida de manera acrítica como escala privilegiada (si no única) para la gobernanza urbana, la idea de barrio ha contribuido a legitimar e institucionalizar una acción vecinal fragmentada y despolitizada, con escasa capacidad de producir lo urbano. Desde una posición crítica a esta noción de barrio y su implícita manera de concebir las relaciones entre las comunidades y las políticas urbanas, este artículo propone una aproximación multiescalar y política de lo vecinal, resumida en el concepto de geografías de la acción vecinal. Para ilustrar esta aproximación se analiza el caso del distrito de Nou Barris, en Barcelona, donde la actuación de las organizaciones traspasa los límites de la noción hegemónica de barrio, constituyendo relaciones más complejas y territorialidades más amplias que buscan incidir en lo urbano. Se concluye que la acción vecinal puede adoptar diversas ‘geografías’ y constituir nuevas configuraciones relacionales no constreñidas por espacialidades limitantes. Puede escalar sus ámbitos de actuación desde la proximidad residencial inmediata a la ciudad entera, y desempeñar un rol fundamental al intermediar entre el habitar cotidiano y el sistema político.
... Hunter (1975) sugerował zanikanie tradycyjnych społeczności bazujących na silnych więziach sąsiedzkich. Od ponad dwudziestu lat rozważania teoretyczne oraz studia empiryczne dotyczące tej kwestii prowadzi wraz z grupą współpracowników Barry Wellman z Uniwersytetu Toronto (Wellman, 1979;Wellman i Leighton, 1979;Wellman, 2001aWellman, , 2001bWellman i Hampton, 2003). W podobnym tonie wypowiadają się kilkadziesiąt lat później między innymi Etzioni (1993), Blokland oraz Savage (2001), Bridge (2002), Mesch i Levanon (2003). ...
... "społeczność zaniku" (the lost community), w której jednostki utrzymują nieliczne, zanikające więzi społeczne z osobami z sąsiedztwa lub spoza niego, "społeczność trwania" (the saved community), w której jednostki przede wszystkim utrzymują więzi społeczne w bezpośrednim, najbliższym sąsiedztwie, "społeczność uwolnienia" (the liberated community), w której jednostki głównie decydują się na utrzymywanie więzi społecznych z osobami spoza sąsiedztwa. Autorzy twierdzą, iż coraz częściej spotykanymi formami społeczności są "społeczności uwolnienia" , w których przeważają więzi społeczne poza sąsiedzkie, a więzi sąsiedzkie schodzą na plan dalszy lub zupełnie przestają odgrywać istotną rolę w życiu społecznym (Wellman, 1992(Wellman, , 1996(Wellman, , 1997(Wellman, , 2001a. Udział w jednej, solidarnej i zintegrowanej społeczności bazującej na przynależności do wspólnego terytorium zostaje zastąpiony uczestnictwem w wielu grupach, kręgach towarzyskich oraz stowarzyszeniach. ...
ZARYS TREŚCI Znakiem naszych czasów są kontakty sąsiedzkie organizowane on-line. Badacze od kilku dziesięcioleci obserwują i analizują to zjawisko w społecznościach miejskich min. Kanady i Stanów Zjednoczonych. W niniejszym artykule przedyskutowuje się problem tzw. e-sąsiedztwa na przykładzie jednego z poznańskich osiedli. W tym celu przeprowadzono analizę wypowiedzi pojawiających się na forum osiedlowych oraz dokonano analizy struktury funkcjonalnej i społecznej forum. Opracowanie składa się z czterech części: omówienia kierunku przeobrażeń sąsiedztw na podstawie współczesnej literatury, prezentacji zjawiska powstawania forów osiedlowych w Polsce i Poznaniu, właściwej dla opracowania analizy forum Osiedla Wilczak oraz podsumowania poruszającego kwestię określoną w tytule tekstu.
... In actual settings, often there are more than two communities (local social networks, production units, etc.). Urbanization has led to a proliferation of diverse subcultures and enhanced interaction and diffusion between them as a daily principle of contemporary life [15], [16]. In organizational settings, 'network brokers' can bridge existing 'structural holes' and connect multiple segregated sectors and facilitate cooperation among them [17], [18]. ...
... . SI.16: The effect of community structure on the evolution of cooperation for LFR benchmark graphs. Each marker represents the average value of data points falling in the corresponding bin of for modularity. ...
Social structure affects the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. Here, we study the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in fragmented societies, and show that conjoining segregated cooperation-inhibiting groups, if done properly, rescues the fate of collective cooperation. We highlight the essential role of intergroup ties, which sew the patches of the social network together and facilitate cooperation. We point out several examples of this phenomenon in actual settings. We explore random and non-random graphs, as well as empirical networks. In many cases, we find a marked reduction of the critical benefit-to-cost ratio needed for sustaining cooperation. Our finding gives hope that the increasing worldwide connectivity, if managed properly, can promote global cooperation.
... In actual settings, often there are more than two communities (local social networks, production units, etc.). Urbanization has led to a proliferation of diverse subcultures and enhanced interaction and diffusion between them as a daily principle of contemporary life [15], [16]. In organizational settings, 'network brokers' can bridge existing 'structural holes' and connect multiple segregated sectors and facilitate cooperation among them [17], [18]. ...
... . SI.16: The effect of community structure on the evolution of cooperation for LFR benchmark graphs. Each marker represents the average value of data points falling in the corresponding bin of for modularity. ...
Social structure affects the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. Here we study the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in fragmented societies, and show that conjoining segregated cooperation-inhibiting groups, if done properly, rescues the fate of collective cooperation. We highlight the essential role of inter-group ties, that sew the patches of the social network together and facilitate cooperation. We point out several examples of this phenomenon in actual settings. We explore random and non-random graphs, as well as empirical networks. In many cases we find a marked reduction of the critical benefit-to-cost ratio needed for sustaining cooperation. Our finding gives hope that the increasing worldwide connectivity, if managed properly, can promote global cooperation.
... For Cohen (1995) geographical boundaries are less relevant than community identity, a mental construct that gives people meaning and creates identity through shared meanings, rituals or cultural practices. Going further, other authors challenge the notion of spatial bounds of communities, describing them rather as networks that can provide sociability, support and identity and can form in digital spaces, around certain events and through shared interests and identities, often characterised by the digital age and globalisation (Bauman 2000;Castells 2000;Wellman 2001). Once again, other authors increasingly focus on the importance of place-based social connections to form communities -by regarding the importance of social cohesion among neighbours or by emphasising the role of local institutions in brokering such connections (Sampson 2012;Small 2006). ...
... SNA is a method for enhancing the sharing of knowledge by analyzing the position and structure between actors, i.e their relationships. According to [17], the network analysis process considers basically two analytical perspectives that complement each other: ...
The social network analysis (SNA), branch of complex systems can be used in the construction of multiagent systems. This paper proposes a study of how social network analysis can assist in modeling multiagent systems, while addressing similarities and differences between the two theories. We built a prototype of multi-agent systems for resolution of tasks through the formation of teams of agents that are formed on the basis of the social network established between agents. Agents make use of performance indicators to assess when should change their social network to maximize the participation in teams
... Identification to the team will have positive effects on work activities, but achieving it may be challenging for distributed teams. Even though people seek different issues in networks (information, co-working, support etc.) and the same network usually means different things for different people (Wellman, 2001), a sense of belonging together and group level identification should be strived in a community or network which has common goals, like AKTIIVI and AVO. ...
In recent years there has been a lot of effort to foster better communication between the development projects. Without communication in the project network, results of the project will remain in the level of unconnected statements and findings. To enable the communication and accordingly, information sharing and building of a common view, there must be a certain degree of familiarity, sense of belonging together and a common ground between the project actors. Since the project actors are geographically distributed, a technology mediated channel is needed for communication. It also promotes becoming acquainted with each other and building trust which is prerequisites for fluent communication. We introduce the results of two separate sub-studies, which are part of larger project research. Sub-studies concentrate on the following research questions: What kind of technology should be chosen to support the communication in a physically distributed project network? How social media is based communication technology adopted by the project actors? We will also present our findings concerning other than technology related issues in technology selection. We suggest that social media tools have characteristics that may be valuable in distributed communication, but they also bring new challenges concerning technology adoption and acceptance processes, when less advanced users are concerned. Previous studies have helped in setting up a framework for technology selection for distributed teams, but new social media tools and their potential for intended communication haven't been studied much. We suggest that features of social media tools bring new possibilities and also challenges for the adoption of technologies, especially for less advanced users who don't belong to networks of more advanced users. More advanced users seem to try new technologies quite fluently, but they may give up using them quickly, if the tools don't fit for their requirements and purposes. We found several references about the features which should be present in a tool which will support communication. Also other features which are important prerequisites for communication in such a network were found. Familiarity of the project actors and willingness to work together, informal communication and contextual and situational issues and personal preferences for different kind of tools were found to have be important or have an effect on the communication.
... 22 It marks the ascendancy of networked individualism, representing a shift from place-oriented to person-centric communities. 23 The digital landscape also fosters a continuous learning environment and knowledge acquisition by playing a crucial role in disseminating information. 24 Social networking sites (SNSs), the modern-day embodiment of identity expression, have revolutionized the way individuals construct and convey their individuality. ...
In recent years, the integration of digital technology into mental health care has become increasingly prevalent. However, digitalization serves as a dual-force catalyst in the domain of psychological sciences, presenting a spectrum of unparalleled opportunities and significant challenges. The technological growth required for providing mental health interventions transcending geographical and temporal constraints also contributes massively to the emergence of psychological phenomena that can detrimentally impact mental health. This overview explores the intricate relationship shared between digitalization and mental health, investigating the challenges posed by the digital landscape on psychological well-being while highlighting the potential of digital platforms to address mental health concerns and enhance overall well-being
... In particular, social capital is found to affect knowledge sharing and growth in both direct and indirect ways. This may support Wellman's (2001) and Hampton and Wellman's (2003) claims about the positive complementary role played by information and communications technologies and face-to-face contact in fostering socio-cognitive dynamics in communities-for example, information and communications technologies may foster weak ties that span structural holes (see Burt, 2000). ...
This article investigates patterns of knowledge exchange in hybrid communities where virtual and face-to-face links of communication are complementary. The study framework is based on social capital theory. The role of social capital dimensions and motivational factors in fostering the exchange of different forms of knowledge is investigated at an individual level. The proposed theoretical model is tested through structural equation modelling, and the analysis is carried out on a sample of over 250 individuals belonging to the community of users of the National Library of Latvia. The results confirm most of the theoretical hypotheses, but with some unexpected results– such as the relevant role of motivational factors in fostering the exchange of complex forms of knowledge– highlighting the specific nature of hybrid communities.
... In this research I was interested in determining if online community discussions could lead to offline civic engagement. Although I was not able to conclusively state a direct correlation between online community discussions and offline acts of civic engagement I did find that online communities help raise critical consciousness of important issues, which I called "civic enlightenment" (Vincent, 2009 & Wellman, 2004;Rheingold, 2000;Shah & Kwak, 2001;Wellman, Boase, & Chen, 2002;Wellman, Haase, Witte, & Hampton, 2001;Wellman, 2001;Williams, 2006) I also knew I wanted to look at a different aspect of digital technology, not just technology use but technology education and production. This led me to build an initial prospectus examining the role of alternative media providers in increasing civic engagement in passive individuals through the use of citizens' media. ...
Self-empowerment and accurate representation for lower socioeconomic status groups is a dire and growing need in America. This dissertation examines how participatory media processes can serve as catalysts for change in populations of poverty and homelessness in the U.S. Using critical theory and qualitative analysis, I analyze the relationship between participatory media and voice, dialogue, and critical consciousness at two case studies, POOR Magazine and Sanctuary Women’s Development Center, and argue that through the interaction of these key components in the participatory media process, self-empowerment and a sense of agency will result. I also examine where the possibility lies for civic engagement in the participatory media process. Additionally, this study argues that the participatory media process can serve as a reflexive lens for people in poverty and homelessness to critically analyze structural forms of oppression and their role in creating social change. Ultimately, I propose the concept of digital reflexivity and assert that digital reflexivity serves as a critical catalyst throughout processes of voice, dialogue, and critical consciousness for the increase of self-empowerment and agency.
... In his research of social networks and communities, Barry Wellman found that nostalgic definitions of "tightly-bounded, densely-knit groups of broadly based ties" rarely exist. Instead his research showed that contemporary Western communities "are usually loosely-bounded, sparsely-knit, ramifying networks of specialized ties", and therefore more networks and social groups like online communities would fall under the classification of community and social network (Wellman, 2001). No matter the precise definition, current meaning needs to focus on the abstention of the necessity of geographic proximity as the same foundational necessities that can still be met through the virtual realm. ...
Based on Jean Gebser's structures of consciousness, this paper proposes to investigate an area of sub-cultural interest that provides an example of how the process of integrality is still underway and how some sub-cultural communities are making steps towards its progression. A recent sub-cultural phenomenon, PostSecret.com, has arisen that encourages viewers around the world to mail in personal secrets for on-line posting and discussion. The website creates an open forum that allows users to share personal secrets anonymously without fear of retribution for controversial topics or socially taboo ideologies. This realm of virtual community building can be seen as making a step towards integrality as it attempts to reveal, explore and discuss the underlying secrets to the human soul. It is still however, only at the milestone of showing acknowledgement that societal cultures are only en route to becoming integral as the very existence of personal secrets and the concealment thereof are the antithesis of integrality.
... 16 Turkle, 1997. 17 Wellman, 2001. zik amatőrök fényképeinek, blogjainak, videóinak stb. ...
Az új politikai kommunikáció az újmédia következtében jöhetett létre, és a horizontális hálózatok kommunikációja figyelhető meg benne. A hagyományos politikai kommunikáció jellemzője volt, hogy a vertikális kommunikáció határozta meg. A vertikális kommunikáció pedig a médialogika elméletét eredményezte, ami a média politika feletti győzelmét jelenti, hiszen rákényszerítette a politikai szereplőket, hogy a korábban használt kommunikációs kódjait (pártlogika) új kódokkal helyettesítse (médialogika), ahol a média elvárásai vannak a középpontban. Ez a logika kap kihívót az új politikai kommunikációban létrejövő horizontális hálózatok kommunikációjában. Az újmédián megjelenő logika átformálja a politikai szereplők viselkedését, aminek jellegét további kutatásokkal lehetne pontosan meghatározni.
... Networks of social ties shape the community through unifying and dividing forces. Network theory has elaborated social ties as place independent and as community formations (Granovetter 1983;Putnam 2000Putnam , 2007Wellmann 2001). Mobility within a specific place supports community development with a sense of belonging and place, while outward mobility has the potential to weaken these features. ...
Recent research has focused on local context as crucial for inclusion. This paper focuses on schools' prerequisites for inclusion and how such prerequisites can be theorised. We explore theoretically and empirically how location, commuting, and social ties interrelate and influence schools' prerequisites for inclusion. Using case studies, we compare two schools' local contexts. We find that the local place and community contribute to students' relations, including how they interact with and include each other in school. We also find that the local composition of social ties is crucial for schools' abilities to develop as inclusive communities and that commuting influences teachers' involvement in local community and school, and with students. The theoretical model presented is used to analyze the schools' prerequisites for inclusion. ARTICLE HISTORY
... Avtor izhaja iz tega, da kooperacija predpostavlja določeno bližino; tako geografsko kot tudi socialno in kulturno. Po drugi strani pa tuji (Wellman 2001) in domači (Trček 2003) avtorji, ki se ukvarjajo s preučevanjem virtualnih skupnosti kot družbenih skupnosti, opozarjajo na dejstvo, da družbene skupnosti niso več nujno tesno povezane solidarnostne skupine posameznikov, ki so si tudi teritorialno blizu, temveč gre lahko tudi za omrežja prijateljev, ki ne živijo teritorialno si blizu. ...
V prispevku obravnavamo obtok, diseminacijo in aplikacijo znanstvenih iz-sledkov, kar poimenujemo transfer znanja. Glede na to, da je proces transferja znanja družbeno dejanje, je za njegovo uspešno izpeljavo ključen socialni kapital. Z namenom preverjanja te teze je najprej opravljen pregled procesa transferja znanja s poudarkom na stanju v Sloveniji ter analiza posameznih razsežnosti socialnega kapitala: strukturne, relacijske in spoznavne. KLJUČNE BESEDE: socialni kapital, transfer znanja, znanje, človeški kapital, družba znanja 1 Uvod Pridobivanje ter upravljanje s človeškim kapitalom oz. znanjem postaja vse bolj pomembno, zaradi česar se današnjo družbo med drugim označuje tudi kot družbo znanja. 2 Po eni strani družba znanja omogoča dostop do znanja vsem posameznikom oz. družbenim skupinam, po drugi strani pa ustvarja vedno ostrejše ločnice-tako na ravni posameznikov kot tudi na ravni držav ali regij-med tistimi, ki znanje imajo in ga uporabljajo, ter med tistimi, ki do znanja nimajo dostopa. Zaradi tega nekateri avtorji (Ilič 2006) govorijo celo o paradoksu družbe znanja, s čimer mislijo na to, da ob verjetni gospodarski rasti in povečanju skupne družbene blaginje zaradi nenehnih inovacij prihaja do neenakomerne porazdelitve te blaginje (npr. zaradi prerazdelitve virov, dohodkov in omejenosti dostopa do njih) po različnih družbenih slojih in skupinah. Negativna posledica tega je povečevanje verjetnosti družbenih konfliktov. Po Iliču (prav tam) ta paradoks daje družbi znanja naravo ne le tehnološko in gospodarsko dinamične družbe, ampak tudi inherentno konfliktne družbe. Kot bomo videli v nadaljevanju, postajajo procesi, povezani z generiranjem, cir-kulacijo, aplikacijo in diseminacijo znanstvenih izsledkov, kjučni dejavnik razvojne 1. Članek je nastal v okviru projekta Socialni kapital in transfer znanja, ki ga izvaja Center za teoretsko sociologijo na Fakulteti za družbene vede Univerze v Ljubljani. 2. Termin družba znanja je utemeljil Robert Lane v članku The Decline of Politics and Ideology in a Knowledgable Society, objavljenem leta
... These relations can constitute communities [2], in the sense that they bound together people and institutions with shared interests: elements of solidarity and interdependency can mobilize them to a collective action in order to achieve common purposes. Although they are not necessarily local, those networks imply the dynamism of each institution in the search, maintenance and mobilization of its partners. ...
The ESCXEL Project, Schools of Excellence Network began from the initiative of a group of researchers from CesNova, centre of sociological studies of the New University of Lisbon, after their interpretation of the tendencies and challenges that Portuguese education system has been facing. It works like a Network with several partners: five municipalities and all the schools belonging to those municipalities who freely wanted to participate. It's a pioneer and innovative project in Portugal, since all actors from educational community are present in the research as well as in the changing processes within schools. Taking advantage of the scientific and technical competences of CesNova's researchers the main objectives are to capacitate schools and communities (students, teachers, parents, citizens, policy agents) to promote educational excellence; to capacitate and support the municipalities to adopt local educational development strategies; to identify, disseminate, monitor the "good scholar practices"; to develop self evaluation processes and finally to produce scientific knowledge about local educational, social and cultural dynamics. To achieve those aims, investigators mobilize scientific competencies so others may benefit from analysis, diagnostic, intervention instruments, sustained in methodologies according to local contexts and problems. They also have the responsibility to produce and disseminate scientific studies, articles, reports and training actions. Municipalities contribute with mobilization and coordination of necessary resources. Schools offer their competencies, experience, innovation and qualification capacities to allow dissemination of the good educational and organizational practices. We are now able to share some of our results and instruments that are being implemented. The most regular instruments are analysis reports like the ones that characterize economic and educational status of the five municipalities; and those that analyze the results of each educational cycle exams (4 th , 6 th , 9 th and 12 th) since 2000 until 2010. These serve the purpose of identifying what is eventually falling in the educational process and promote the necessary actions to correct what is wrong. They also are helpful in internal and external evaluation processes of each scholar unit. It's a project aim, to organize about four seminars a year in order to gather all professionals from all schools and also their educational communities plus the researchers from CesNova, to promote communication, experience sharing and team work among all partners. ESCXEL network' schools also serve as a laboratory and a study object so that researchers may use that field and it's information to apply a set of interviews and inquiries on several themes, a work that ends with the production of analysis reports to be disseminated among schools, for their own benefits, and with the production of scientific thesis. The analysis of one of the strategic documents of schools-the Educational Project-is also taking place and a model of that document, more concise and adequate to the school strategic organization is being built. With the purpose of developing and improving scholar, pedagogical and organizational procedures, the Network is also experimenting new ways of teaching sciences and a new form of organizing classes, through the constitution of profile classes.
... Reference to the network structure in regard of the actors and links may lead to a better evaluation of network practices and decision-making for stakeholders such as identifying which facets need further attention or how the cooperative should continue. Regional development and community establishment, for example, can be assessed and managed in a fundamentally different way: planners can refer to SNA to gradually discuss policy implications by visualizing how the community is organized, noting its characteristics, and classifying them appropriately under regional development, community building, and community interaction [29][30][31][32]. ...
The administrative turn to urban regeneration in South Korea prompts an examination into the social aspects of sustainability for project areas. This retrospective study used social network analysis (SNA) to compass the 2015–2018 formation of Jangwi urban regeneration community, with average degree, centralization, and efficiency for network level and degree for individual level. The study aimed to identify the network’s structural characteristics in terms of relationships and social linkage. Average degree results note a rise in social exchange (2015: 0.609; 2018: 4.060), while the 2018 centralization value (<0.5) and community efficiency indicate how such network communication is dependent on key influencers. Introduced is a visual and quantitative analysis method for community networks that may warrant urgent attention in the field of Korean urban regeneration, as it provides potential strategies for governments and administrations to accomplish sustainable and strategic goals.
... Although the number of relationships that connect the individual to others and to communities has not decreased, the proportion of loose and trust-lacking relations grew to the detriment of the reliable connections. Globalisation has augmented the number of secondary relationships as well, since the spread of the Internet lead to virtual acquaintances which are mainly weak ties rarely transformed into strong bonds (Granovetter 1973, Wellman 2001. ...
... Elsôsorban a gyenge kapcsolatok arányát gyarapították a globalizáció hatására alakuló internacionális kapcsolatok is. Az internet használattal terjedô virtuális kötelékek között ugyancsak túlnyomórészt gyenge kötelékek alakulnak, ezek csak ritkán transzformálódnak erôs kötéssé (Granovetter 1973, Wellman 2001. ...
... This is especially striking in view of China's dramatic urbanization and related residential mobility, which have uprooted virtually all pre-reform communities (Li 2005). Similar changes in Western cities did prompt a rich literature on community and the neighbourhood (for example , Fischer 1982;Wellman 2001). ...
This chapter discusses the urban structure of China’s post-reform cities arguing that it constitutes a form of enclave urbanism: an urban structure with high degrees of cultural, functional and economic sorting of groups and activities over distinct areas, separated by physical, legal and/or social boundaries. Reproducing forms of in- and exclusion, this structure has many similarities with the structure of cities elsewhere. However, criticizing five often-implicit assumptions of the enclave urbanism literature, this chapter employs Manuel DeLanda’s (2016) assemblage theory to understand enclaves as assemblages of heterogeneous elements that are themselves part of multiple assemblages operating on various ‘scales’. The resulting relational comparative view guides attention to both similarities and differences between enclaves in different locales. Applying this view, this chapter first presents the literature on China’s urban enclaves, before discussing consequences of China’s enclave urbanism for the access to and exclusion from urban services, and for social networks respectively. Observing inadequacies in the Anglophone urban China literature, the chapter culminates in a research agenda.
... De uma forma muito sucinta, podemos dizer que a ideia de comunidade remete para um agrupamento de pessoas com interesses, normas e valores comuns e subsequentemente um sentimento de união e de pertença. Elementos de solidariedade e interdependência estão portanto presentes, e essa identidade partilhada e reconhecida pode mobilizar as pessoas para uma acção colectiva, ou seja, para prosseguirem certos interesses e objectivos(Wellman, 2001). ...
... With the general concept of community remaining problematic, contemporary literature has gradually focused on the notion of "social network". The attention has then shifted from the controversial ideal-type of community to the more specific and less cumbersome concept of social relation, or "community tie" (Wellman, 2001, Wellman, Leighton, 1979, Wellman, Wortley, 1990. Albeit this theoretical turn has eased the empirical approach to different types of community, a new social process is currently challenging its strength: the overlapping of local and virtual in Social Network Sites (SNS). ...
By adopting the dialogic and reflexive approach of the new ethnography, the paper aims to show how a novice field researcher, astonished at the intensity and cheerful, noisy tone of the interactions between female call centre operators, is prompted to take note in her diary of all the playful complaints, insults and jokes hurled at users without their knowledge. The analysis of these clandestine mocking rituals, which are typical of the service sector jobs, reveals the double game played by phone operators: in the presence of their colleagues, they distance themselves from their role by performing comic feats and challenging each other to an ingenious competition of insults and jokes. The mocking practices make it possible to relieve the tension of the work routines and show how conforming to the art of making fun of users reaffirms and legitimizes the members’ attachment to the group
... Some scholars considered guanxi different from social network (King, 1985(King, , 1991, while empirical research on guanxi suggested that guanxi practices could not be fully interpreted using the framework of social network, and thus guanxi has certain features that make it essentially Chinese (Burt, 1992(Burt, , 2002Bian, 1994;Bian and Ang, 1997;Xiao and Tsui, 2007). Another group of scholars disagreed with the uniqueness and Chineseness of guanxi (Lin, 2001;Wellman, 2001;Wellman et al., 2002). They tried to incorporated guanxi culture within a larger conceptual framework of social network. ...
Guanxi, roughly translated as “social connection,” is a term commonly used in the Chinese language. In this study, we employed a linguistic approach to explore popular discourses on guanxi. Although sharing the same Confucian roots, Chinese communities inside and outside Mainland China have undergone different historical trajectories. Hence, we took a comparative approach to examine guanxi in Mainland China and in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau (TW-HK-M). Comparing guanxi discourses in two Chinese societies aim at revealing the divergence of guanxi culture. The data for this research were collected on Twitter over a three-week period by searching tweets containing guanxi written in simplified Chinese characters (关系) and in traditional Chinese characters (關係). After building, visualizing, and conducting community detection on both semantic networks, two guanxi discourses were then compared in terms of their major concept sub-communities. This study aims at addressing two questions: Has the meaning of guanxi transformed in contemporary Chinese societies? And how do different socio-economic configurations affect the practice of guanxi? Results suggest that guanxi in interpersonal relationships has adapted to a new family structure in both Chinese societies. In addition, the practice of guanxi in business varies in Mainland China and in TW-HK-M. Furthermore, an extended domain was identified where guanxi is used in a macro-level discussion of state relations. Network representations of the guanxi discourses enabled reification of the concept and shed lights on the understanding of social connections and social orders in contemporary China.
... If the group is built around social engagement, the community can easily interact in virtual settings: "people construct community symbolically, making it a resource and repository of meaning, and a referent of their identity" (Cohen 1985, p. 118). In a network of social belongings digital communities become complementary to physical ones (Wellman, 2001). ...
Blended learning communities are defined by specific learning and psychosocial processes based on the multilayered sense of belonging of the group’s members, related to the merging of both virtual and real interactive contexts. This chapter focuses on the psychosocial dynamics of blended communities, in order to identify some specific participation strategies and identity dynamics, which both vary with the double interactive context. We used a qualitative variant of Social Network Analysis to analyse the interactions of two blended student communities, identifying various participation trajectories and identity positionings of the group members. The results revealed that the blending of two communication contexts generates different psychosocial dynamics from those activated by the same community in a wholly on- or offline context. The combination of interactive environments results in participation strategies in which members can choose distinctive trajectories, shaping their original identity positionings.
Background
Loneliness and social isolation are associated with adverse mental and physical health outcomes in adults. However, there is a lack of existing research on effective interventions and the contexts in which these could be implemented.
Primary objective
To assess the clinical and cost-effectiveness of a social network intervention compared to usual care among at-risk populations.
Design
A pragmatic, community-based, cluster randomised controlled trial with embedded health economic evaluation, process evaluation and qualitative study. Outcome assessments were conducted at baseline and at 3 and 6 months.
Setting
The study was conducted in collaboration with 44 community-based organisations in two regions in England.
Participants
Adults aged ≥ 18 years at risk of loneliness and social isolation.
Intervention
A facilitated social network tool (‘project about loneliness and social networks’; PALS) designed to link people to opportunities for social involvement. First, participants map and reflect on personal social networks. Second, identification of local resources based on individual preferences, available support, and health and wellness needs.
Main outcome measures
The primary outcome was mental wellness at 6-month follow-up, measured by the Short Form questionnaire-12 items mental health component score (MCS). Secondary outcomes included the Short Form questionnaire-12 items Physical Health subscale, loneliness, social isolation, well-being and collective efficacy. Economic measures assessed the cost-effectiveness of the intervention in terms of costs, quality-adjusted life-years and net monetary benefits.
Results
We recruited 469 adults into the study, with 120 withdrawals (25.6%). The main trial results indicate little to no treatment effect of the intervention on either the primary or secondary outcomes compared to usual care. The within-trial economic evaluation found that PALS was inexpensive to deliver but there was no significant difference in quality-adjusted life-years, measures of well-being capability or costs, and the intervention did not lead to demonstrable cost-effectiveness in terms of net monetary benefits. The process evaluation found PALS to be acceptable to all types of community organisations, but low resource availability and capacity to sustain PALS was found across all community organisational contexts. Qualitative interviews ( n = 20) highlighted that participants wanted to engage with meaningful social activities but barriers to doing so were psychological (i.e. confidence and competence) and practical (i.e. transport or cost).
Limitations
The timing of COVID-19 and associated restrictions (approximately splitting trial follow-up into thirds of pre-COVID, during the first lockdown, and following the trial reopening) meant its impact on the trial is difficult to assess. There were high levels of missing data (20–30% for most outcomes at 6 months), though methods to handle missing data did not change the conclusions of the trial.
Conclusions
Our findings do not provide strong evidence of the efficacy of the PALS social network intervention to address the complexities of loneliness and social isolation. Although the intervention was acceptable to participants and community organisations who hold the potential to deliver such an intervention, sustainability would require a networked approach between organisations to mitigate against the challenges found in each organisation.
Future work
Future interventions for loneliness would likely benefit from utilising a multistep approach providing tailored psychological, relational and social components.
Trial registration
This trial is registered as Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN19193075.
Funding
This award was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Public Health Research programme (NIHR award ref: 16/08/41) and is published in full in Public Health Research ; Vol. 13, No. 1. See the NIHR Funding and Awards website for further award information.
Digital technology and the internet constitute an integral part of individuals' and society's lives in the modern era. Digital interaction significantly influences social, cultural, and economic aspects, giving rise to a new field known as digital sociology. This field encompasses a diverse range of topics, including sociological imagination and social agency in the context of the digital networked environment. This research aims to understand the impact of digital culture and identity on user behaviors and the shaping of social interactions online. The study focuses on exploring digital sociology and its significance in analyzing social and cultural dynamics in the digital networked environment, emphasizing the challenges faced by this environment and proposing comprehensive solutions. The study presents several suggestions and measures to achieve a safer and more sustainable digital environment through awareness enhancement, training, and expanded access to technology. It also underscores the importance of developing effective policies and laws to protect users and promote diversity and inclusivity in the digital environment. The study highlights the role of sociological imagination in understanding the effects of the digital environment, guiding decision-making, and shaping public policies. The researcher emphasizes the importance of using sociological imagination to design innovative solutions that meet societal needs and promote positive technological developments. In conclusion, the study emphasizes that digital sociology is an evolving and exciting field for study and research. It underscores the importance of continuous research and innovation to keep pace with changes and challenges in the digital environment, emphasizing that continuous learning and knowledge-based collaboration form the foundation for the development of an advanced and thriving digital environment for the future
Minyak kayu putih merupakan komoditas unggulan daerah
Kabupaten Buru, minyak yang berasal dari tanaman epidemik
kayu putih yang memiliki sifat antiseptik, antibakteri dan
antijamur. Disaat pandemi covid-19, banyak industri yang
membutuhkan untuk dijadikan bahan dasar obat-obatan.
Namun pada kenyataanya, kondisi yang berbeda akan kita
temui saat melihat kehidupan keseharian petani minyak kayu
putih dimana dengan kondisi ekonomi yang cukup
memprihatinkan serta keberadaan lingkungan sosial ekonomi
yang tertinggal dibandingkan pekerja pada sektor lain.
Ketersediaan sumber alam yang melimpah, para pekerja
minyak kayu putih seharusnya bisa meningkatkan
kesejahteraan.
Kohesi sosial dapat dipahami sebagai kesatuan, keutuhan, dan
kekompakan untuk menjaga anggota kelompok tetap hidup dalam suatu
komunitas. Kohesi sosial masyarakat di sepuluh desa yang dijadikan
sampel (selanjutnya disebut desa sampel) tergolong tinggi karena hampir
semuanya memberikan nilai yang signifikan dalam pemanfaatan sumber
daya yang ada di sekitar desa. Tiga komponen utama indikator sense of
community mewakili tingkat kohesi sosial dalam masyarakat di desa
sampel, yaitu keterlibatan anggota, pemberian pengaruh, dan berbagi
kontak emosional.
Kohesi sosial merupakan pilar utama dalam pembangunan ekonomi desa;
dukungan jaringan, solidaritas, dan kekeluargaan yang dimiliki oleh
masyarakat desa merupakan elemen pendukung utama dalam pertukaran
ekonomi, penguatan ekonomi, dan pemberdayaan ekonomi. Dalam
memenuhi kebutuhan dasar hidup, persoalan substansial yang selalu
dihadapi oleh sebuah keluarga atau rumah tangga adalah bagaimana
individu-individu di dalamnya dapat berusaha semaksimal mungkin dan
dapat bekerja sama untuk memenuhi kebutuhan rumah tangga sehingga
kelangsungan hidupnya tetap terjaga dan model relevansi strategi
adaptasi menjadi model dalam menjawab permasalahan pembangunan
ekonomi pedesaan.
As redes sociais digitais têm se caracterizado como espaços que propiciam as mais diversas formas de sociabilidade, com amplas possibilidades de estruturação de novas conexões e amizades. Também têm possibilitado a disseminação de informações de forma rápida e eficaz, potencializando a articulação de pessoas e movimentos. Neste trabalho, buscamos investigar quais são os limites e as possibilidades da interação social em comunidades do Facebook, tendo como objeto empírico o grupo Direitos Urbanos | Recife. Partimos da Análise de Redes Sociais (ARS) para examinar como se processam as relações de amizade e interação nesse espaço, considerando que são trocas mediadas pela tecnologia.
Las recientes crisis económica y sociosanitaria han puesto de manifiesto las debilidades de un mercado de trabajo que acaba expulsando a los colectivos más débiles. Entre ellos, este documento pone el foco en el colectivo de jóvenes y sus dificultades para desarrollar trayectorias laborales estables. Diferentes estudios muestran los efectos negativos de la escasa conexión con el mercado de trabajo, en forma de empleos con escasa estabilidad y/o continuidad o a causa del desempleo, por parte de determinados perfiles de jóvenes. Esta desconexión puede provocar dinámicas de exclusión o aislamiento laboral, lo que retroalimenta la pérdida de recursos de carácter relacional que pueden ser útiles para la reinserción laboral de estos jóvenes.
Este Working Paper presenta algunos de los hallazgos obtenidos sobre esta problemática a partir del análisis de los datos obtenidos en dos estudios diferentes desarrollados en el seno del Centre d’Estudis Sociològics sobre la Vida Quotidiana i el Treball. El primero ha permitido identificar y analizar distintos tipos de trayectorias juveniles de inestabilidad laboral a partir de los datos obtenidos mediante el uso de entrevistas de carácter híbrido. En el segundo de ellos se ha realizado una aproximación cualitativa y biográfica al estudio de las trayectorias juveniles más precarias, con el objetivo de estudiar el papel que los servicios locales de empleo pueden tener en la aportación de recursos, especialmente de carácter relacional.
Although the literature on social capital, social support and social networks uses the concept of emotional support, studies rarely recognise nuances of the emotional relationships in late life. Using a personal communities framework, we examine the subjective meaning of family and friendship ties that form the network of emotionally close relationships of a cohort of Chilean people between 60 and 74 years of age. Chile is an interesting case to investigate personal communities, as the country is facing both a rapid process of population ageing and the consequences of abrupt socio-cultural changes triggered by a military government. We conducted qualitative semi-structured interviews using personal communities diagrams that enabled study participants to reflect on what and how different types of personal ties were important to them. Data analysis included thematic analysis of interview transcripts and classification of identified personal communities using Pahl and Spencer's typology. The personal communities framework proved useful in capturing the composition of older people's networks of close relationships and in reflecting the diverse ways different ties are relevant in late life. We further developed a complementary typology based on the distinction between ‘clustered’ and ‘hierarchical’ personal communities. This complementary typology adds a cultural dimension to understand better emotional closeness in late life in a context of rapid socio-cultural changes affecting levels of social trust.
As individuals continue to move, precipitating one of the largest migrations in history, understanding how they derive their social support, reconfigure their personal networks to stay connected, and attach to the new location is important if we want to gain insight into how lives are connected in contemporary mobile societies. Previous generations of migration were more likely to cut their roots when they moved. Today people move and stay in touch through new communications media.
In this context, this study aimed to explore how mobile individuals¿ mobility patterns affect their social support, personal networks and community attachment, as well as the role of new media across these three notions. Specifically, we look at: (1) what kind of social support is derived by mobile individuals, where is it located and how is it sustained; (2) whether the type of mobility differ systematically in personal networks of mobile individuals; (3) and if community attachment is related to the type of social support and personal networks of mobile individuals.
Ninety-five mobile individuals who had lived in Seville for a minimum of three months were selected from four distinct communities. The four communities, namely Erasmus students, Japanese Flamenco artists, musicians from the local symphonic orchestra and partners of researchers working at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, varied in the types of mobility they propelled and were similar in attracting skilled international migration towards Seville. Field data was collected through an electronic multiple name generator, a structured face-to-face interview and a network visualisation tool. These methods enabled us to gather data on the social support network of the respondents, their media usage, community attachment, personal networks, mobility and socio-demographics.
Results showed that a significant proportion of social support is kept over a distance. In particular, a great deal of emotional support is derived from distant ties with whom respondents meet yearly. Respondents stayed in touch with these ties mostly through frequent communication with mobile phone and email, and also through SNS in the case of young respondents. Participants relied mostly on specialized support: social companionship by recent friends; emotional and co-presence support from old friends and family; and instrumental support from compatriots. We also found that friends are major sources of support and respondents travel more to meet up with friends than with family.
In terms networks, patterns of mobility reflected in the personal networks of our respondents were observed. Respondents who had lived longer in Seville were more likely to have personal networks dominated by the exogroup (locals, alteri living in Seville, friends), just as those who were in Seville for a temporary period, knowing that a displacement to another location (be it country of origin or other) was either imminent or definite, were more linked to the endogroup (alteri living in country of origin, family, compatriots, etc). Temporary mobility was characterised by frequent contact with social ties residing in other locations, replacement of strong ties by a wider variety of weak ties through which company and socialization is derived, and frequent travel to sustain support from distant ties.
When it comes to community attachment, respondents appeared to be susceptible to a weak sense of community but this was not reflected in respondents¿ discourse on how they connected to Seville. Respondents characterised by a settlement type of profile were more likely to score a higher sense of community. Despite scoring low on the sense of community index used (McMillan & Chavis, 1986), participants claimed to connect to Seville in a variety of ways, reflecting different notions of community attachment. High listing of Spanish alteri providing multiplex support and the respondents¿ expectation of living in the host location for a long period seemed to be the strongest predictors of a high place attachment in our study.
Social communities helps people to interact and engage both socially and cognitively. Direct and indirect relationships are built through these interactions with the members in the community. The members may be known, unknown, friends or relatives. With the invent of Web 2.0, Internet users were empowered with the ability to interact, share content and collaborate over the dynamic web pages. The evolution of technologies has helped the transition from offline to Online Social Communities (ONSC). Social interaction also got transformed within communities encouraging both offline and online connect. In this chapter, a comprehensive review of ONSC is done. First, the ONSC dimensions-user relationships, social interaction, common interests and virtual environments along with OSNC features-purpose, membership, rules and terms, user generated content, users-benefits and types are discussed in detail. Types of communities for ONSC are given based of three different school of thoughts. Second, the importance of ONSC management—user acquisition, user engagement and user retention, across different user participation life cycle stages—initial, growth, matured and decline, which is further mapped to user membership involvement phases, is given. Various perspectives, recommender systems and user engagement tools for ONSC are also included. A survey of ONSC structure detection techniques of disjoint and overlapping communities for both static and dynamic network structures is done. Finally, the applications of ONSCs across various domains are explained. The summary of popular ONSC available till date and supported businesses flourishing based on ONSCs are explicitly mentioned.
Mediated interaction plays a significant role in the social life of adolescents in Norway. The purpose of the present article is to examine the qualities of mediated interaction and the integration of mediated and immediate social spheres, suggesting that the ability to juggle between online and offline social spheres has become a characteristic element of social competence in network societies. More specifically, the analysis looks at the use of personal media for maintaining and developing existing social relationships and for extending social networks. Qualitative interviews with 20 Norwegian adolescents constitute the empirical base. The analysis explains how interaction takes on mundane forms, confirming the value of social relationships between in-person meetings. Moreover, it is argued that mediated communication differs from face-to-face communication, not by being less meaningful, but by enabling other forms of disclosing practices. Mediated forms of communication, hence, have an influence on the character of social ties and networks.
The paper highlights two specific areas against the background of the overall economic change of the last 100 years. The two main issues addressed are: 1)changes in the spatial distributions of social networks and 2) interpersonal dynamics of daily travel behavior. The spatial distribution of the social network is tied in with the basic spatial/travel choices of a household, i.e., home, work and school locations bound together by the mobility tools owned. Those basic choices frame the day to day dynamics of travel given the overall time-space regimes of society. The discussion of day to day dynamics centers on the activity generation and its interaction with the personal world of the traveler. Long term commitments, higher level needs, and projects generate activities which are coordinated by travelers through their activity calendars.
A neighbourhood effect is commonly defined as an impact on people’s socio-economic outcomes that can be attributed to differences in the neighbourhood context. Neighbourhood effects have received increasing attention in the last decade from social researchers. However, many recent reviews of the empirical literature on neighbourhood effects reach the conclusion that no consensus has been reached on whether neighbourhood effects exist, or on which neighbourhood contexts produce which outcomes, which causal relationships are at work, or which groups are affected most. The empirical identification of neighbourhood effects is impeded both by theoretical and methodological challenges and, more importantly, lack of data.
Neighbourhood effects studies aim to explain characteristics or behaviours of individuals through the neighbourhood context and assume that the populations of small geographical entities are highly homogeneous and that the areas’ characteristics can therefore be used to explain individual-level outcomes. Moreover, it is assumed that spatial proximity and social similarity leads people to become even more similar to each other.
However, once we allow the individual’s behaviour to be influenced by the context we have to acknowledge that the individual does at the same time influence the context. By choosing the neighbourhoods in which they live, people also actively seek the contexts that will influence them. It is analytically and methodologically difficult to disentangle these effects. A further problem in the identification of neighbourhood effects is that of defining the relevant contexts, both in terms of the boundaries of the spatial units and in terms of the characteristics of the areas. Which contexts matter for which outcomes? Are ‘neighbours’ just the people in the adjacent homes, or everyone in the same town? Can neighbourhood effects meaningfully be established when we consider that people are becoming increasingly mobile and that they are confronted with a number of different local and social contexts? Even if the neighbourhood effects research could provide sufficiently good answers to these questions, it would still be difficult to find the kind of data needed to investigate the matter empirically.
In the German case, it has been the lack of data that has impeded neighbourhood effects studies. It is extremely difficult and costly for individual researchers to get data describing people’s neighbourhoods. In contrast to most countries, Germany does not collect the population census data traditionally used by neighbourhood effects researchers to establish the neighbourhood context of respondents to large-scale nationally representative surveys. In Germany, the last census was collected in 1987 (East Germany: 1981). Data protection laws furthermore prohibit the disclosure of most geographically referenced data that might otherwise be available. As a result, there are only a handful of case studies for selected German cities that investigate the possible operation of neighbourhood effects (Hamburg: Alisch and Dangschat (1993), Cologne: Friedrichs (1998), Berlin: Häußermann and Kapphan (1999)).
Most of the empirical evidence on neighbourhood effects is anecdotal and does not allow causal inference. The methodological design of the studies neither allowed researchers to look at a control group (for instance, poor people living in an affluent neighbourhood) nor to follow people over time as they move to other neighbourhoods or as their neighbourhoods undergo changes.
The cornerstone for representative and longitudinal neighbourhood effects studies in Germany was laid when it became possible to match data of the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) with data at the zip-code level. Geographically referenced data at this scale have been obtained from a number of Statistical Offices of German cities. In addition, the data pools of micro-marketers offer a wide-range of qualitative neighbourhood indicators. Following strict data protection measures, select waves of SOEP have been matched on the basis of the study’s sensitive address records with a selection of these indicators. The point at which this was undertaken was the starting point for the research presented in this doctoral thesis.
This study starts with an extensive review of theoretical and empirical work on neighbourhood effects (Chapter 2). It re-examines first theoretical and then empirical research from the disciplines of economics and sociology. There have been a number of recent reviews of neighbourhood effects studies (for instance Dietz 2002; Sampson, Morenoff et al. 2002; Durlauf 2003) and we may argue that there is no need to provide yet another one. However, the economics and sociology literature proved to overlap only to a minor extent and the studies offer fairly distinct insights into neighbourhood effects. One contribution of this thesis is to bring these schools of thought together.
Comparing sociological and economic theories of neighbourhood effects, we find that the former have a tendency to focus on just parts of the broader picture. We look at the three most prominent models proposed in sociology – ‘contagion models’, ‘collective socialisation models’, and ‘institutional models’ – which are drawn upon to explain negative effects of living in neighbourhoods with a higher population of socio-economically disadvantaged people. A fourth model, the relative deprivation model, on the other hand, is used to explain positive effects of living in neighbourhoods with poor aggregate characteristics. All four models, however, could potentially also explain the opposite direction of effects. The strength of the economic theories – ‘interactions-based model’ and ‘models with local and global interactions’ in particular – is that they identify the conditions under which disadvantaged and advantaged neighbourhoods may or may not have negative effects on individual-level outcomes.
The review of empirical studies, which follows the discussion of neighbourhood effects theories, shows that most empirical studies do not set out to test any of the propositions made by theorists. We re-examine sociological and economic studies that draw on a wide range of methodologies, including ethnographical, experimental and quantitative studies in both fields. European studies are taken into account where possible given the fact that recent reviews of neighbourhood effects studies have tended to overlook the European research.
This thesis adds to the literature on neighbourhood effects by testing empirically whether people’s life satisfaction depends on their relative income position in the neighbourhood (Chapter 3). From the perspective of neighbourhood effects research this is an empirical test of relative deprivation theory, which posits that people are unhappier the better off their neighbours are. It has already been shown that people’s own income and others’ incomes matter for life satisfaction (e.g., Clark and Oswald 1996; Ferrer-i-Carbonell 2005). This makes a proof of the existence of the effect per se redundant, allowing us to focus on the identification of the particular context effect of neighbours’ income on life satisfaction. From the perspective of happiness research, the research presented in Chapter 3 is a test of whether or not the so-called ‘relative income’ hypothesis also holds when the reference group concerned is one’s neighbours.
We use a unique dataset for these analyses – the 1994 and 1999 waves of the SOEP matched with neighbourhood indicators at the German zip-code level (roughly 4,000 households). This way we know for every respondent of the SOEP how well off they are and also how well off the people in their local environment are. The richness of the dataset allows us to control extensively for other characteristics of individuals, their families and their neighbours and to formulate more sophisticated hypotheses about possible routes for the comparison effect to operate. In addition, the longitudinal structure of both our neighbourhood context dataset and the SOEP allows us to control for unobserved heterogeneity at the neighbourhood and at the individual level.
The empirical results presented in Chapter 3 suggest that there are sizeable neighbourhood effects on people’s life satisfaction: People living in small communities, self-owned property and in proximity to facilities that serve recreational purposes are happier than others. However, people in Germany are not unhappier the more income their neighbours have, as relative deprivation theory predicts, but – if anything - in fact happier. We find positive effects of neighbourhood income on happiness in all cross-sectional models and this is robust to a number of robustness tests, including adding in more controls for neighbourhood quality, changing the outcome variable, and interacting neighbourhood income with indicators that proxy the extent to which individuals may be assumed to interact with their neighbours. The impact of neighbours’ income on happiness is not highly statistically significant. In fact, it is only statistically significant in 1999 and borderline statistically significant in most models. But the neighbourhood income effect does not turn negative. The only negative effect of neighbourhood income on happiness we identify is for individuals with young children in the household. For these it appears to be a struggle to “keep up with the Schmidts” .
Do we have to conclude from these findings that the predictions of the relative deprivation theory are wrong? Or are there other reasons that may explain why we do not identify a negative comparison effect?
It is a common critique against neighbourhood effects research that it uses statistical constructs of neighbourhood that are too big and too crudely delineated to satisfy any more sophisticated definition of a neighbourhood, i.e., as a physical and social space. The scale at which we operationalise ‘neighbourhood’ is the smallest geographical entity that has ever been taken to establish the local context in German research. However, the German zip-code areas may be too large to detect the particular social comparison effect that we try to identify.
During the course of this research, more micro-geographical data at different scales of neighbourhood became available, facilitating empirical analyses that would not have been possible at the start of this project. In addition to indicators of neighbourhood income at the zip-code level, indicators that apply the same income definition became available at two much more local scales, i.e., the market-cell level and the street-section level. This allows us to investigate systematically in Chapter 4 whether the social comparison effect operates at smaller scales of neighbourhood and also to test whether critiques that have been brought up against the use of large, statistically defined neighbourhood units are confirmed by the empirical evidence. We look at whether larger neighbourhood units confound heterogeneity of the population in the neighbourhoods, and re-estimate models used in Chapter 3 including neighbourhood incomes at three different scales.
The majority of the results are the same whichever neighbourhood scale the reference income is measured at, and at the smaller geographic scales the effects are statistically significant. People in Germany are happier the more income their neighbours have, and we only find negative effects for individuals with young children in the household. For this group of the population we find that the neighbourhood income effect is more adverse when measured at the zip-code level than at the more immediate neighbourhood scales. We then address the critique that neighbourhood effects research operates with too poor a conceptualisation of neighbourhood by testing whether our neighbourhood effects are the same when we restrict the sample to individuals for whom we may assume that our neighbourhood units are not merely physical but also social spaces. The neighbourhood income effects remain positive but, for this smaller sample, they turn statistically insignificant.
It is possible that neighbourhood income effects operate at multiple scales simultaneously. At the larger geographical scale, the prosperity in the neighbourhood may proxy better employment prospects, which may translate into greater happiness, while the comparison effect may only operate at the very local level. We show that not controlling for these area effects at larger scales biases the coefficients on our more locally defined neighbourhood characteristics. We find that the income in the market cell (corresponding to the average income of approx. 400 households around a person’s home) has the biggest influence on happiness, and is positive. At this scales of neighbourhood, the size of the coefficient is least affected by omission of neighbourhood characteristics at the other scales of neighbourhood. In these models, a number of neighbourhood income effects turn negative. However, the negative effects are not statistically significant.
Perhaps close neighbours do not matter after all. This would be in line with the empirical result that we do not identify a negative comparison effect of the closest neighbours, while there are sizeable effects of higher prosperity in wider areas. The neighbourhood used to be considered the place where people work, where family and relatives live, and where friends are found. With increasing modernisation, however, people have become less dependent on their immediate local environment. They venture out into other places. Jobs, shops and places for recreation are outside peoples’ neighbourhoods. Access to public transportation and telecommunications make it possible to maintain contacts to like-minded people irrespective of where they live. Increasingly, when people perceive their prospects in the area as poor, they move away, even from family and friends. Greater mobility means that people are influenced not just by their neighbourhood but also by other contexts. This undermines the neighbourhood context hypothesis. The close neighbourhood may have lost its importance.
In Chapter 5 we investigate empirically whether it may indeed be true that greater mobility is associated with close neighbours becoming less important. We focus on three different types of mobility that have been proposed to negatively impact on neighbourliness, namely residential mobility, access to modes of public and private transport, and changes in the availability of modern communications technologies. Our proxy for how much neighbours matter is the SOEP respondents’ accounts of how often they visit with their neighbours. In comparison, we look at the strength of people’s ties with their families and the sensitivity thereof to changes in mobility.
Residential mobility, so the argument goes, increases the relative costs of investing in and maintaining links to people in the neighbourhood. Conversely, residentially mobile people have been suggested to maintain closer links to their family and relatives, i.e., the people who have been permanent companions and to whom strong emotional ties exist. Greater physical mobility means that people can more easily cover distances to reach people and places outside the neighbourhood. Since many people do not have family members living nearby, access to train services or their own car makes it possible to visit family members. Yet Internet use – dubbed virtual mobility – takes time that could be used to do other things. This in particular may have changed people’s inclination to interact with others face-to-face, not only with neighbours but also with family (or friends). It is a multifaceted tool which offers many types of activities and has an addictive potential. Its use has become less expensive over time as prices for personal computers have dropped and more Internet providers have entered the market. The Internet may be the community of the future as local communities lose their significance.
The kind of data needed to empirically investigate a complex matter like this is not readily available in any single wave of SOEP (or in fact in any other social survey). Consecutive waves of the survey were pooled and matched with micro-marketing data, ensuring that people did not change neighbourhoods between the surveys – otherwise neighbourhood characteristics, accounts of social interactions with neighbours and mobility portfolios would not refer to the same place.
The empirical analyses show increases in all forms of mobility in the decade from 1994 to 2004. Virtual mobility has entered into people’s lives at an immense pace, while residential mobility and physical mobility have increased more gradually. Parallel to this the incidence and frequency of social interactions with neighbours has declined, and we show that this is negatively associated with residential mobility, access to transport and Internet use. In contrast, the incidence and frequency of visits with family has remained constant over time. We show that family visits are not associated with changes in access to modes of transport, and that the correlations with residential and virtual mobility are in opposite directions. Greater residential mobility is correlated with more family visits and virtual mobility appears to weaken family ties as well as neighbourhood ties.
Our multivariate analyses for 1999 and 2004 confirm these results. We test for a number of alternative explanations why mobility may be associated with declines in visits with neighbours. For instance, we test whether people’s decisions to visit neighbours or family may be driven by personal preferences rather than mobility portfolios by restricting the sample to individuals who we may assume not to have chosen their neighbourhood based on personal preferences (young people living with their parents), by interacting mobility effects with personal characteristics that suggest a particular inclination toward mobility and that may be correlated with people’s sociability, and also by controlling for unobserved heterogeneity. The effects of residential and virtual mobility are robust to these alternative explanations and we do not find effects of physical mobility. While residential mobility appears to have a trade-off effect on visiting with neighbours to the benefit of visiting with family, Internet use undermines sociability with neighbours and family. The negative effect of Internet use on people’s sociability in the real world may not continue, however, since most people are already using the Internet and the magnitude of the effect was much smaller in 2004 than in 1999. Overall, our results show that social contacts with neighbours are more volatile than family ties to changes in people’s mobility. With further increases in mobility, close neighbours may become less significant but even in a mobile society such as that of Germany in 2004, the incidence of visits with neighbours is sizeable and not close to zero – in contrast to the frequent assertion in the literature that the neighbourhood does not matter.
The neighbourhood does matter – the research presented in this thesis documents this using the German example. It may not matter in the way that neighbourhood effects researchers expected and some effects prove to be difficult to identify even when very local and very timely data are used (as is the case here). Studying neighbourhoods is a very inspiring subject and the research presented in this thesis cannot necessarily cover all aspects. Chapter 6 summarises the main conclusions of this research and points out avenues that may be taken in the future to further understand how neighbourhoods affect people’s lives.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.