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Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life
Abstract
Social capital theorists have shown that inequality arises in part because some people enjoy larger, more supportive, or otherwise more useful networks. But why do some people have better networks than others? This book argues that the answer lies less in people's deliberate “networking” than in the institutional conditions of the churches, colleges, firms, gyms, and other organizations in which they happen to participate routinely. This book introduces a model of social inequality that takes seriously the embeddedness of networks in formal organizations, proposing that what people gain from their connections depends on where those connections are formed and sustained. The model is illustrated and developed through a study of the experiences of mothers whose children were enrolled in New York City childcare centers. As a result of the routine practices and institutional conditions of the centers—from the structure of their parents' associations, to apparently innocuous rules such as pick‐up and drop‐off times—many of these mothers dramatically increased their social capital and measurably improved their wellbeing. Yet how much they gained depended on how their respective centers were organized. This book identifies the mechanisms through which childcare centers structured the networks of mothers, and shows that similar mechanisms operate in many other routine organizations, from beauty salons and bath houses to colleges and churches. The book makes a case for the importance of organizational embeddedness in the study of personal ties.
... But of course formal associations do not need to be ethnically defined. Mario Luis Small (2009), in his study of child care centres in New York, showed how parents (usually mothers) benefitted not only from the practical support of such groups but also from informal friendship making opportunities. These new connections also resulted in sharing useful information that might not otherwise have been easily accessed. ...
... As Eve says in his chapter in this volume, the formation of a relationship between two individuals is not a purely individual affair: what the two persons talk about and do concerns other people, and so their conversations and activities often would not exist without those other people. In the case of the friendships formed by Small's (2009) childcare centres, the parents' children are obviously central. But in all social relationships it is not just the individuals directly involved who are important for the relationship but also others 'in the background'. ...
... I do not claim to have written a complete survey of the way migration shapes the social networks of migrants and those of their children. For example, I have touched only indirectly on contacts with organizations (from childcare centres to schools to sports clubs) yet as Mario Small (2009) shows, many social ties originate in organizations, so it would be important to bring out the specificities of migrant families' relationships with organizations, which certainly exist. And I have not touched on the specificities of the networks of migrants arriving via the asylum trajectory, specificities I believe help to explain the lower employment rate of refugees compared with other migrants (what is called the "refugee gap") (Perino & Eve, 2017;Eve & Perino, 2018). ...
Research on social networks of immigrants and their descendants usually starts from the distinction between ‘ethnic’ ties and ties to members of the population without migration background. In migration studies ‘ethnic’ ties are repeatedly associated with ‘strong ties’, whereas ‘weak ties’ – that are found to be essential for the access to jobs in the wider society – are associated with contacts to members of the ‘majority population’. Building on existing criticism of this narrowing dichotomy and looking at upward social mobility careers of immigrants’ descendants we question this group-related understanding of weak and strong ties. Examining professional trajectories of immigrants’ descendants in Germany, this chapter suggests shifting the focus to occupational contexts in order to understand better how and why different types of social ties can play an important role for their professional mobility. We argue that both the quality of ties and their ‘ethnic dimension’ are dependent on the occupational context with its specific institutionalized modes of access and recruitment. Moreover, different forms of ‘ethnic’ or ‘cross-ethnic’ ties develop a changing significance in the course of a career and over time; this makes it necessary to also look at the dynamics in careers and the occupational contexts. The chapter compares the role of social ties for the inclusion into two occupational fields: law and public administration. It draws on interviews with (mainly Turkish) immigrants’ descendants working in these sectors. While in the law sector mainly ‘weak ties’, which had been built up during university studies and in the course of later careers, proved important, in public administration ‘strong ties’ to relatives and friends were most crucial for the access to jobs. In both sectors, we can observe that ties to ‘co-ethnics’ become increasingly relevant for professional careers as people of immigrant descent gradually achieve higher positions.
... For him, a good employee is someone who treats all customers with the same respect and level of service, thereby levelling potential (status or ethnic) differences between them, this being an "unanticipated gain" (Small 2009) of frequenting the café. Hence, the café works hard to mitigate differences among customers, in particular ethnic differences, and these levelling practices support the social inclusion and the sense of belonging in the business. ...
... As per Granovetter (1973), weak ties, such as acquaintances, tend to promote social integration because they often occur between people with different backgrounds, including different interests and experiences, and thus help to bridge diverse societal groups. 210 Therefore, place attachment and feelings of belonging 211 can also be seen as "unanticipated gains" (Small 2009) that come with shopping or working in these stores, or as a by-product from spending time in a neighborhood's (semi-) public spaces. My discussion of the manifold, intermingling private and public behaviors demonstrates how they lead to a sense of relaxation, sociability, and social exchange which in turn fosters feelings of belonging, attachment, and "home." ...
... My discussion of the manifold, intermingling private and public behaviors demonstrates how they lead to a sense of relaxation, sociability, and social exchange which in turn fosters feelings of belonging, attachment, and "home." Hence, to conceptualize the businesses as places whose socio-spatial features allow for the practice of community also allows us to analyze how this as a social "more" is offered, to trace back and work out the processes and mechanisms that lead to this "more," as an unanticipated or anticipated gains (Small 2009) of frequenting (customers), but also operating (staff) these places. But furthermore, and as will be argued further in the next chapter, it is the owners and employees with their distinct social practices, who first and foremost generate these social benefits. ...
This chapter brings together the lessons learned about how store owners and their businesses foster positive interactions – a social “more” – among neighborhood residents. It substantiates the appropriateness of viewing store owners as socially important figures whose business activities contribute to local social life – by building places where community is practiced. Drawing on the deep ethnographic data described in previous chapters, it offers a grounded (emerging) theory focusing on the micro-interactions in the stores, summarizing how the manifold interactions described in previous chapters cumulate into new patterns of belonging and understanding in everyday urban life.
... Individuals act and interact in networks, and in doing so they cluster in groups. Groups therefore emerge out of networks, but they are also sources of network formation (Feld, 1981): they constitute collective actors where disciplines coalesce (White, 1992(White, , 2008, imposing practices and regulations and altering individuals' networks beyond their control, often without awareness (Small, 2009). Collective actors (institutions, laboratories, editorial boards, funding agencies, technological devices, etc.), in other words, play an agentic role in providing opportunities, offering resources, imposing limits and producing inequalities. ...
... The IPs can assist the creation of social networks to stimulate the mobilization of resources necessary to boost adoption and diffusion of agricultural technology and knowledge through active interactions and learning among actors(Schut et al. 2017). Building such networks is in line with theory and research that acknowledge social capital 1 as a significant resource that people may use to address issues in their daily lives(Obaa and Mazur 2017;Small 2009). ...
... Así, estas están mediadas por diferentes planos de la realidad. Uno de ellos tiene que ver con el contexto organizacional que estructura la vida cotidiana de las personas (Small, 2009). En el caso de las instituciones educativas, se trata de sus reglas, procedimientos, rutinas y jerarquías. ...
Los docentes constituyen un pilar clave del proceso educativo. En una situación-límite disruptiva de la vida cotidiana, como aquella de la pandemia del COVID-19, ¿cómo fueron puestas en movimiento las redes personales de apoyo de los docentes para responder a sus emergentes necesidades laborales (enseñanza) y personales? ¿Cuál fue el papel de los marcos institucionales y organizacionales en este proceso? Este estudio busca responder estas preguntas a partir de material empírico de docentes peruanos de educación secundaria durante la pandemia del COVID-19. El diseño metodológico fue de carácter mixto (sociométrico y cualitativo). Se encontró una diversidad de procesos de movilización de los lazos de apoyo. En particular, destacamos la presencia de procesos de movilización mixtos. Asimismo, los marcos institucionales (familia) y organizacionales (instituciones educativas) permearon de diferentes maneras estos procesos. Los docentes recrearon rutinas organizacionales que existían antes de la pandemia, pero también desarrollaron nuevas prácticas de apoyo. Algunas de estas prácticas tendieron a rutinizarse, pero otras fueron resistidas, debido a sus consecuencias no buscadas negativas en las vidas de los docentes. Estos resultados aportan nuevos elementos analíticos a teorías existentes sobre procesos de movilización de lazos de apoyo.
... Unlinkings from these weak and bridge ties may have crucial effects on an individual's opportunities, although individuals may have little awareness of what potentials have been lost ("bridge decay"; Burt, 2002). To paraphrase the title of Small's (2009) book, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life, there is a need to examine the unanticipated losses of social capital that accompany unlinkings and how these losses interact with inequality. Being freed from someone who brings risk to one's life, or from someone who has little to offer with respect to their own or others' capital, is not a toll. ...
This article introduces the concept of “unlinked lives” and illustrates its significance for scholarship on the life course. There are many lessons to be learned about human interdependence by focusing not on relationships that are formed and then maintained, but instead on relationships that are lost or ended by choice or circumstance, such as through changes in institutional affiliations, social status and positions or places. Unlinked lives carry important social meanings, are embedded in complex social processes, and bring consequences for the wellbeing of individuals, families, and societies. To develop this concept, we put forward nine key propositions related to when and how unlinkings happen as processes, as well as some of the consequences of being unlinked as a status or outcome. The coupling of “unlinked lives” with “linked lives” offers a crucial avenue for advancing life course theories and research, integrating scholarship across multiple life periods and transitions, and bridging the two now-distinct traditions of intellectual inquiry on the life course and on social networks.
... We build from classic research on urbanism, which argued that the urban context fundamentally reshapes the networks of residents by leading to the weakening or loss of close social bonds, particularly kin ties, and their replacement with secondary or non-kin ties (e.g., Wirth, 1938;Fischer, 1982). More recently, this research focus has narrowed its focus from the urban context writ large to the consideration of structural and social dimensions of the residential neighborhood that have implications for access to social and economic resources that profoundly shape life chances (Sampson et al., 2002;Aneshensel, 2010), and may also be relevant for processes of network tie formation (Small 2009;York Cornwell and Behler, 2015). Broadly speaking, structural dimensions refer to neighborhood socioeconomic conditions, including the socioeconomic well-being of its residents and overall residential stability Schieman, 2005;Wheaton and Clarke, 2003). ...
Increasing research highlights heterogeneity in patterns of social network change, with growing evidence that these patterns are shaped in part by social structure. The role of social and structural neighborhood conditions in the addition and loss of kin and non-kin network members, however, has not been fully considered. In this paper, we argue that the residential neighborhood context can either facilitate or prevent the turnover of core network relationships in later life - a period of the life course characterized by heightened reliance on network ties and vulnerability to neighborhood conditions. Using longitudinal data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project linked with data from the American Community Survey, we find that higher levels of neighborhood concentrated disadvantage are associated with the loss of older adults' kin and non-kin network members over time. Higher levels of perceived neighborhood social interaction, however, are associated with higher rates of adding non-kin network members and lower rates of adding kin network members over time. We suggest that neighborhood conditions, including older adults' perceptions of neighborhood social life, represent an underexplored influence on kin and non-kin social network dynamics, which could have implications for access to social resources later in the life course.
... As someone immersed in the field as a community or organizational member, the researcher may be able to triangulate and validate data---in particular the qualitative data under collection for network analysis--in real time and to set more accurate boundaries due to familiarity with the community, organizational, or interorganizational relationships under study. Reflexive fieldwork aligns well with socially constructed grounded theory approaches (Charmaz, 2014) and with sequential interviewing (Small, 2009b), which is a qualitative techniques where interviews are not used as part of a predetermined sampling frame of x number of people, organizations, network relationships, communities, or political jurisdictions, but rather as a process of emergence (Charmaz, 2008). In sequential interviewing, social and organizing phenomena emerge through the interviewing process over the course of the study with information from one interview informing the questions of the next interview or interviews throughout the research process. ...
... One reason for this is that segregation may exacerbate inequities in how resources like experienced teachers and advanced course offerings are distributed across schools [17,22,51]. Segregated schools may also impede access to social networks, which may in turn limit access to the kinds of "bridging social capital" that can help them access new resources, jobs, and other quality-oflife-enhancing opportunities [4,9,14,64]. There is evidence that integration can reduce inequalities in academic outcomes [31,55,70], especially when academic environments are re-designed to be inclusive of an increasingly diverse student body [8,9]. ...
Educational data scientists often conduct research with the hopes of translating findings into lasting change through policy, civil society, or other channels. However, the bridge from research to practice can be fraught with sociopolitical frictions that impede, or altogether block, such translations -- especially when they are contentious or otherwise difficult to achieve. Focusing on one entrenched educational equity issue in US public schools -- racial and ethnic segregation -- we conduct randomized email outreach experiments and surveys to explore how local school districts respond to algorithmically-generated school catchment areas ("attendance boundaries") designed to foster more diverse and integrated schools. Cold email outreach to approximately 4,320 elected school board members across over 800 school districts informing them of potential boundary changes reveals a large average open rate of nearly 40%, but a relatively small click-through rate of 2.5% to an interactive dashboard depicting such changes. Board members, however, appear responsive to different messaging techniques -- particularly those that dovetail issues of racial and ethnic diversity with other top-of-mind issues (like school capacity planning). On the other hand, media coverage of the research drives more dashboard engagement, especially in more segregated districts. A small but rich set of survey responses from school board and community members across several districts identify data and operational bottlenecks to implementing boundary changes to foster more diverse schools, but also share affirmative comments on the potential viability of such changes. Together, our findings may support educational data scientists in more effectively disseminating research that aims to bridge educational inequalities through systems-level change.
... Early research on "thin" or "weak" ties indicated their tremendous power in helping young job searchers find work through their extended networks (Granovetter 1973). Even a small, neighborhood-based childcare center can provide users and their families with critical information and assistance (Small 2009). For example, in our interviews, individuals cited the importance of these ties to practicing their faith in the pandemic: ...
Public cooperation with health experts and authorities plays a critical role in curbing the spread of disease during outbreaks such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Through data collected using mixed methods in May and June of 2020, we investigate the influence of information from horizontal and vertical ties on the likelihood that individuals would practice safe and healthy behavior. We look at actions such as staying home, wearing personal protective equipment, and increased handwashing in two northeastern U.S. metro areas. Controlling for factors thought critical in previous studies, our analysis of more than eight hundred survey responses and more than sixty interviews finds that reliance on information from horizontal and vertical ties correlates significantly with behaviors designed to curb the spread of the virus.
... In Mario Small offers a helpful account of social capital. 10 He explains that "social capital theory argues that people do better when they are connected to others because of the goods inherent in social relations." 11 Small is particularly concerned with the ways that differences in the qualities of individuals' networks -what he refers to as "network inequality" -contribute to differences in wellbeing. ...
... Following discussions with project partners in the field, I started to relate and translate anthropological (Faier & Rofel 2014), geographical (Wilson 2017) and sociological (Blokland 2017) debates into an ecological concept of encountering (Bieler 2021). The notion of encounter allows us not only to address the importance of weak or absent social ties (Small 2009(Small , 2017Felder 2020), but also to analyze the mutual co-constitution of humans and urban environments, highlighting how emergent environments are at once embodied and effected by these embodiments. Such a heuristic pays particular attention to material elements as active forces within an encounter, and through this interrogation the distinction between 'the social' and 'the biological' is transcended. ...
Im Rahmen meiner Forschung über die Zusammenhänge von psychischer Gesundheit und städtischen Umwelten in Berlin, Deutschland, beobachtete und arbeitete ich in und mit einem Projekt zur Verbesserung der Lebensbedingungen für Menschen mit schweren psychischen Problemen unter den Bedingungen eines angespannten Wohnungsmarktes. Im Laufe des Projekts wurde ich über ‚lediglich‘ teilnehmendes Beobachten hinausgehend ein aktiv mitarbeitendes Projektmitglied. Diese Art des Engagements basiert nicht auf einer ethischen Verpflichtung gegenüber den moralischen und politischen Zielen der Forschungspartner*innen, sondern stellt vielmehr eine Methode zur Generierung von situiertem empirischem Wissen und Konzepten dar. Die Arbeit mit dem Projekt ermöglichte es, Situationen des kritischen Dialogs und der Konfrontation zu schaffen, wodurch sich über einen zeitlichen Verlauf hinweg analytische Ideen herauskristallisierten. So verschwimmt die Trennung zwischen beobachteten und beobachtenden Subjekten ebenso wie die zwischen Beobachten, Intervenieren und Analysieren. Darüber hinaus argumentiere ich, dass die aktive Teilnahme an einer Intervention als ethnografische Langzeitintervention dienen kann, die auf die Produktion neuartiger Forschungsfragen und methodischer Erkenntnisse abzielt, die weitere Forschungszusammenhänge informieren können. Das Ziel der Intervention liegt also abseits von und geht über die lokal beobachteten Probleme hinaus. Ich werde dieses Argument kurz erläutern, indem ich meinen Beitrag zu den interdisziplinären Interessen der Urban Mental Health Forschung diskutiere.
... A social network can be perceived as the actual set of connections of all types among a group of individuals (Mitchell 1973). Social networks provide small services (such as lending basic household items and financial assistance), emotional aid, and a sense of belonging (Wellman and Wortley 1990;Small 2009;Kadushin 2012). Researchers refer to the use of social networks to meet various needs as the 'activation' or 'mobilisation' of social ties or the 'help-seeking process' (Stack 1974;Wellman and Wortley 1990;Pescosolido 1992;Renzulli and Aldrich 2005;Small 2017). ...
Intentional collaboration among school principals and school counselors can improve the student experience by better meeting students’ social/emotional, academic, and career and college readiness needs. In this special issue, we seek to share the many ways school counselors and school administrators (e.g., principals, assistant principals) can effectively work together to ensure that school counseling programs throughout pre-K–12 schools are comprehensive, support equitable opportunities, and empower all students to experience success. This special issue includes 11 articles representing conceptual, qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, and best practices methodologies with a commitment to equity and access while simultaneously bridging social capital to create networks of resources within the school and the community to support all students.
An increasing amount of work studies fairness in socio-technical settings from a computational perspective. This work has introduced a variety of metrics to measure fairness in different settings. Most of these metrics, however, do not account for the interactions between individuals or evaluate any underlying network's effect on the outcomes measured. While a wide body of work studies the organization of individuals into a network structure and how individuals access resources in networks, the impact of network structure on fairness has been largely unexplored.
We introduce templates for group fairness metrics that account for network structure. More specifically, we present two types of group fairness metrics that measure distinct yet complementary forms of bias in networks. The first type of metric evaluates how access to others in the network is distributed across groups. The second type of metric evaluates how groups distribute their interactions across other groups, and hence captures inter-group biases. We find that ignoring the network can lead to spurious fairness evaluations by either not capturing imbalances in influence and reach illuminated by the first type of metric, or by overlooking interaction biases as evaluated by the second type of metric. Our empirical study illustrates these pronounced differences between network and non-network evaluations of fairness.
The Black Lives Matter movement has operated alongside a growing recognition among social scientists that policing research has been limited in its scope and outmoded in its assumptions about the nature of public safety. This essay argues that social science research on policing should reorient its conception of the field of policing, along with how the study of crime rates and police departments fit into this field. New public safety research should broaden its outcomes of interest, its objects of inquiry, and its engagement with structural racism. In this way, next-generation research on policing and public safety can respond to the deficiencies of the past and remain relevant as debates over transforming American policing continue.
A large literature establishes the role of mobility in the maintenance of neighborhood social structures. Jane Jacobs famously argued that social capital is maintained through “cross-use of space,” and James Coleman formalized its dependence on the “closure” of human interactions. Since many of these interactions entail human movement, neighborhoods with higher social capital should be distinguishable by more cohesive mobility networks. I observe the mobility of Chicago residents through a large dataset of smartphone users. I construct a neighborhood-level mobility network for the city and characterize neighborhoods according to their local graph structure. Neighborhoods that are well integrated with their surroundings have higher income and educational attainment. Consistent with social capital theory and routine activity theory in criminology, higher local network integration independently predicts lower levels of violent and property crime. The methodologies presented provide a meaningful, replicable, and inexpensive approach to the structural measurement of neighborhood networks and social structure.
Does poverty hinder or encourage market creativity? Businesses that offer novel, creative products have greater growth potential than businesses that conform to market norms. Yet the literature offers conflicting views on the relationship between poverty and market creativity. Some research suggests poverty restricts entrepreneurs’ capacity to offer novel products, whereas other work suggests poverty facilitates creativity in the marketplace. This paper addresses that tension by examining the shifting relationship between poverty and market creativity across stages of business development. Drawing on survey and interview data from Panama, this paper shows how entrepreneurs are both catalyzed and constrained by conditions of poverty. Poor individuals actively generate novel venture concepts in the early stages of business development. In later stages, however, they struggle to sustain those novel businesses. Ultimately, poverty limits entrepreneurs’ capacity to profit from the creativity they bring to the marketplace. This paper elucidates the dual relationship between poverty and creativity, and helps explain why economic mobility via self-employment proves elusive for the poor.
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