This classic study of how 282 men in the United States found their jobs not only proves "it's not what you know but who you know," but also demonstrates how social activity influences labor markets. Examining the link between job contacts and social structure, Granovetter recognizes networking as the crucial link between economists studies of labor mobility and more focused studies of an individual's motivation to find work.
This second edition is updated with a new Afterword and includes Granovetter's influential article "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problems of...

Philippe Bourgois's ethnographic study of social marginalization in inner-city America, won critical acclaim when it was first published in 1995. For the first time, an anthropologist had managed to gain the trust and long-term friendship of street-level drug dealers in one of the roughest ghetto neighborhoods--East Harlem. This new edition adds a prologue describing the major dynamics that have altered life on the streets of East Harlem in the seven years since the first edition. In a new epilogue Bourgois brings up to date the stories of the people--Primo, Caesat, Luis, Tony, Candy--who...

In their previous book, Exchange in Oceania, anthropologist Per Hage and mathematician Frank Harary demonstrated that models from graph theory, a branch of pure mathematics, provide the essential basis for analyzing the great variety of exchange systems in Micronesian, Melanesian, and Polynesian societies. In this new book the authors extend these models and apply them to the analysis of communication, kinship, and classification structures in the island societies of Oceania, presenting the relevant topics from graph theory in a form accessible to the nonmathematical reader. The research...

Social network analysis, which focuses on relationships among social entities, is used widely in the social and behavioral sciences, as well as in economics, marketing, and industrial engineering. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications reviews and discusses methods for the analysis of social networks with a focus on applications of these methods to many substantive examples. As the first book to provide a comprehensive coverage of the methodology and applications of the field, this study is both a reference book and a textbook.

This book is about the way in which industrial production in Germany was conditioned by social, political, and regional factors from the seventeenth century to the present. The argument is distinctive because it pays so much attention to small and medium sized firms, and because it suggests that Germany does not have a single coherent national system of industrial governance. This social constructivist point of view presents a direct challenge to the Gerschenkronian, Schumpetarian, and Chandlerian approaches to Germany's economic history.

This book examines almost two decades of research using the structural or network approach to political behavior. Network analysis begins with the assumption that the most important elements of political power are the relationships of influence and domination among social actors. Influence is the exchange of information about preferences and intentions; domination is the exchange of material sanctions to reward or punish compliance with commands. By examining the confluence of these two networks, analysts can develop a structural picture of the political process. David Knoke provides an...

Guanxi, loosely translated as "social connections," or "social networks," is among the most important, talked about, and studied phenomena in China today. Guanxi lies at the heart of China's social order, its economic structure, and its changing institutional landscape. It is considered important in most every realm of life, from politics to business, and from officialdom to street life. This volume offers the latest scholarly thinking on the subject by top China sociologists whose work on guanxi has been influential and by new scholars offering cutting-edge insights on the topic.

Departing radically from traditional content analysis approaches to the quantitative study of texts, this work is based on a linguistic theory of narrative, rather than the ad hoc approaches of context analysis. The book illustrates a set of tools--story grammars, relational data models, and network models--that can be profitably used for the collection, organization, and analysis of narrative data in socio-historical research (e.g., narratives of strikes, demonstrations, lynchings, and riots).

Contrary to common perception and belief, most island societies of the Pacific were not isolated, but were connected to other island societies by relations of kinship and marriage, trade and tribute, language and history. Using network models from graph theory the authors analyze the formation of island empires, dialect groups, economic and political centers; the evolution and devolution of social stratification; and the development of kinship terminologies, marriage systems and descent groups.

Personal relationships have long been of central interest to social scientists, but the subject of friendship has been relatively neglected. Moreover, most studies of friendship have been social psychological. Placing Friendship in Context is a unique collection bridging social psychological and social structural research to advance understanding of this important subject. In it, some of the world's leading researchers explore the social and historical contexts in which friendships and other similar informal ties develop and how it is that these contexts shape the form and substance the...