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[RRE]Networks in the Global Village
``` [I have taken the liberty of combining a couple of Barry's messages about his new book and reformatting the result to 70 columns.]
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Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1998 10:42:27 -0500 (EST)
From: Barry Wellman
Networks in the Global Village
Barry Wellman, editor
Westview Press, 1999.
ISBN: 0-8133-1150-0
Networks in the Global Village examines how people live through personal communities: their networks of friends, neighbors, relatives, and coworkers. It is the first book to compare the communities of people around the world. Major social differences between and within the First, Second, and Third Worlds affect the opportunities and insecurities with which individuals and households must deal, the supportive resources they seek, and the ways in which markets, institutions, and networks structure access to these resources. Each article written by a resident shows how living in a country affects the ways in which people use networks to access resources.
Barry Wellman is professor of sociology at the University of Toronto. He is the chair of the Community and Urban Sociology section of the American Sociological Association and founder and International Coordinator of the International Network for Social Network Analysis.
For more information, including drafts of the first and last chapters, see the editor's Web page: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/
Contents
The Network Community - Barry Wellman
The Elements of Personal Communities, Barry Wellman and Stephanie Potter
The Network Basis of Social Support: A Network Is More Than the Sum of Its Ties, Barry Wellman and Milena Gulia
Neighbor Networks of Black and White Americans, Barrett A. Lee and Karen E. Campbell
Social Networks Among the Urban Poor: Inequality and Integration in a Latin American City, Vincente Espinoza
The Diversity of Personal Networks in France: Social Stratification and Relational Structures, Alexis Ferrand, Lise Mounier, and Alain Degenne
Network Capital in Capitalist, Communist, and Postcommunist Countries, Endre Sik and Barry Wellman
Getting a Job Through a Web of Guanxi in China, Yanjie Bian
Personal Community Networks in Contemporary Japan, Shinsuke Otani
Using Social Networks to Exit Hong Kong, Janet W. Salaff, Eric Fong, and Wong Siu-lun
Net-surfers Don't Ride Alone: Virtual Communities as Communities, Barry Wellman and Milena Gulia
Communities have continued to thrive around the world, if only people knew how to look for them and how to look at them. The traditional approach of looking at community as existing in localities urban neighborhoods and rural towns made the mistake of looking for community a preeminently social phenomenon in places an inherently spatial phenomenon. Why assume that the people who provide companionship, social support and a sense of belonging only live nearby? The question is important for any era, but it is especially important in contemporary times when people can use cars, planes, phones and electronic mail to see and talk with far-flung friends and relatives.
This is the first book to present a wide range of scholars who have used social network analysis to study community. It goes beyond just documenting the existence of supportive community networks that task has been well-accomplished to analyzing the implications of these community networks for the societies in which they are embedded. The trick is to treat community as a social network rather than as a place. Using this social network approach allows the authors in this book to study people's sociable and supportive community ties with friends and relatives, no matter where they live: across the street, across the metropolis, or across the ocean. The principal defining criterion for community is what people do for each other and not where they live. The social network approach enables the authors in this book to study community without necessarily assuming that all communities are local solidarities. They do so by defining community as personal community, a person's set of ties with friends and relatives, neighbors and workmates.
This book goes beyond the existing situation. Each chapter has been written especially for this book by natives of the countries studied so that we can assess how community networks operate in different societies. It is the first book to bring together analyses of communities from around the globe, presenting original research from eight countries in North America, South America, Europe and Asia as well as from cyberspace. Until now, most research has gone into documenting the composition, structure and supportiveness of community networks in North America. Despite the unfortunate habit of assuming America is the world or likely because of this habit the nature of community networks in the rest of the world has not been clear.
The book is organized as an around-the-world tour. After an introductory statement about personal communities, the first substantive chapter by Barry Wellman and Stephanie Potter uses social network analysis to come up with a new way of thinking about community. We do not have to abandon typologies of community altogether even if the evidence says that we must discard the rigid old way of thinking: "solidary traditional community good/everything else disconnected and bad". The authors use Toronto data to argue that a multifactorial and combinatorial approach will allow us to think about how the various elements of community fit together as building blocks of a typology. They suggest that typologies will aid thinking about the circumstances in which different types of communities will flourish and how being in different types of community will affect peoples' lives.
The second substantive chapter, by Barry Wellman and Milena Gulia builds on this to examine which types of community networks provide what kinds of social support. Until now, most studies of social support have looked only at how different types of social relationships provide different kinds of social support. For instance, parents give adult children much more financial aid than companionship, extended kin are not very supportive, women exchange emotional support while neighbors exchange small amounts of goods and services. Yet social relationships do not exist in isolation but are embedded in social networks. A network is more than the sum of its ties because the composition and structure of a network can affect the resources to which network members have access and the ways in which social relationships operate. The authors analyze which kinds of networks provide what kinds of support. We ask how the characteristics of community networks who they are composed of and the structural pattern of the community ties in them affect the kinds of social support they provide. They find that the greater the range of a community network the larger its size and the greater its heterogeneity the more supportive it is. Moreover, densely-knit community networks are more emotionally and instrumentally supportive than sparsely-knit ones. Thus both the characteristics and the structure of a community network affect its supportiveness, in addition to the characteristics of the ties within it. The nature of a network is more than the sum of its ties.
The next two chapters show how social network analysis can continue to be used to study ties within neighborhoods. Still in North America, Barrett Lee and Karen Campbell compare the ties of black and white residents of Nashville, Tennessee. They directly address a key theme of this book: how has large-scale social change affected the nature of community networks? Their particular interest is in how black and white Americans interact within and across putative racial boundaries. Has segregation fostered the "compression" of community so that there is intense interaction within tightly-bounded African-American neighborhoods? Or has it led to social disorganization and cleavage within these neighborhoods? Lee and Campbell find much evidence of compression and little sign of social disorganization and the loss of community among these segregated African Americans. Indeed, black and white Nashville residents seem to have similar patterns of neighboring, except that the barriers of segregation make neighborhood relationships more important for African-Americans.
By contrast to Lee and Campbell, Vicente Espinoza's examination of community networks is not limited to neighborhood interactions. Yet he, too, discovers much interaction with neighboring kin and friends among the residents of two impoverished neighborhoods in Santiago, Chile. More than any other chapter in this book, Espinoza's contribution relates the kinds of community networks people have to the political-economic nature of their society. In Chile, the authoritarian Pinochet regime had adopted an extreme form of a market-based economy, throwing many people out of work and wrecking the country's widespread social welfare institutions. As a result the recent migrants to the metropolis whom Espinoza studied need their community networks for different things than the comparatively affluent North Americans of Toronto and even of Nashville. Rather than North American concerns about family, emotional support and health care, Santiago residents are preoccupied with obtaining resources for day-to-day survival: getting food, obtaining casual jobs, and maintaining their hastily-built homes. In such circumstances, neighbors are handy sources of food, childcare and information about jobs. There are no telephones, and people do not have the cash to routinely travel elsewhere to visit friends or relatives. The few trips people make to other parts of Santiago or to elsewhere in the country are often for obtaining regular employment. More rarely, someone will put on her best clothes and travel to a rich uncle's house to request a relatively large sum of money.
Crossing the Atlantic brings us to a French chapter by Alexis Ferrand, Lise Mounier and Alain Degenne. Unlike the neighborhood focus of the preceding two chapters, this work ingeniously juxtaposes and analyzes three national samples, concerned with sexual relationships, modes of life, and interpersonal contact. The authors use network analysis to address the same question that preoccupied mile Durkheim more than a century ago: How do social relationships integrate and separate different parts of France? In so doing, the authors use interpersonal data to address a matter at a much larger-scale of analysis: the articulation of different social categories in France through systems of relationships. They discover a complex pattern of linkages among the French in different socioeconomic positions. Moreover, different types of ties create different kinds of connections between social categories. Their research uses interpersonal data to document precisely the classic French rift between the worlds of self-employed workers and wage-earning workers.
Sik and Wellman's chapter studying Hungary under communism and post-communism provides another way of examining how large-scale social structures intersect with interpersonal community networks. They use data from a variety of studies to show the importance of community networks for accomplishing things under both communism and post-communism. One might expect East European communism to be inimical to community because of the ruling class's insistence that no intermediate structures stand between the individual and the state. Moreover, the extensive, often-secret internal security apparatus made it difficult to know who to trust. Consequently, people only had close community ties with presumably-trustworthy immediate kin and very few trusted friends. Yet community flourished in providing material aid. The structural rigidities and material shortages inherent in bureaucratic communism made it imperative for community members and organizational leaders to use networks to get the resources they needed. Using case studies, the authors show that this was so for heads of agricultural organizations, urbanites wanting their own homes, or villagers largely beyond the ken of state apparatchiks.
Has the need for networks disappeared now that communism is gone from Hungary? Sik and Wellman argue that networks have thrived even more in Hungarian post-communism. While insecurities of personal freedom have disappeared and bureaucratic rigidities have softened, Hungarians now have insecure access to jobs, income and capital. They rely on networks to get the multiple jobs they need to survive, to protect their way of life from state regulation, and to assemble the capital they need to start small businesses in a society where none had existed a few years ago under communism. In short, networks seem to be especially important in situations of high rigidity or high uncertainty.
The next three chapters look at Asian networks. Are they as different from Western ones as the proponents of a distinct "Asian way of life" are wont to assert? Like Sik and Wellman, Yanjie Bian studies community networks in a society undergoing a transition from state communism to a new form of post-communism: China. In the new Chinese situation, guanxi (good network connections) are an excellent way to obtain decent jobs despite the explicitly egalitarian and bureaucratic ideology at the heart of the Chinese communist value system. It is not only who you know that is important, but what positions they have and whom they are connected to. In such circumstances of fluid social mobility, the traditional Chinese obligation to kin and neighborhood is being supplanted by ties to well-placed friends of friends. Only strong ties will do, because the favor being asked is an important one involving access to a valuable resource: a good job. Although weak ties might provide more information about jobs, they will not get you one in such a situation of scarcity. The relationship is one of exchanges of favors and not of information diffusion.
In another explicit challenge to contentions that Asian communities are markedly different from Western ones, Shinsuke Otani's chapter demonstrates many similarities between Japanese community networks and North American ones. His data destroy some myths about Japanese community networks: They are not as heavily based on neighborhood and kinship as both Western and Japanese scholars have believed. The Japanese neighbor less than North Americans because the Japanese tend to remain living in the same socially-heterogeneous neighborhoods while the more spatially and socially mobile North Americans keep moving to neighborhoods that are congruent with their current socioeconomic status. Living among similar people leads Americans to neighbor more than the Japanese do even though neighbors are only a minority of North American's community ties. Moreover, long work and travel times have made neighborhood and even kinship less important, especially for Japanese men. Like the situation in the West, extended kin have become the most weakly-tied of community members, tied in by normative obligations and kinship structures but providing little companionship and support.
But even if kinfolk are not helpful on a regular basis, they remain a source of help in extraordinary circumstances, mobilizable by densely-knit kinship structures who can bring normative obligations and social pressures into play. Salaff, Fong and Wong's chapter show that this has often been the case for the residents of Hong Kong who are migrating to Canada. Concerns about the handover of Hong Kong to the mainland Chinese government have impelled many families to seek a haven in the Western world. Middle-class Hong Kong residents use ties with network members already in western countries. Their use of friendship as well as kinship ties to emigrate suggests that differences between kin-oriented Asia and friend-oriented West have been overstated. The authors show that wealthy Chinese eschew network ties altogether when they emigrate. Because they have enough financial and occupational resources to immigrate on their own to Canada, they go it alone and so avoid having future obligations to the network members in Canada who would have helped them. Nor do people shed old-world ways as they step through the immigration gate. For one thing, East-West similarities are greater than has been asserted. For another, those who immigrate may be the ones who were already less connected to kinship and neighborhood solidarities back home. And for a third thing, the kinds of social systems in which people operate significantly affect the nature of their community networks. As people forge community ties, they are not doing so on a tabula rasa; they are operating within the context of existing social relationships and divisions of labor, both interpersonal and interinstitutional.
Chinese businessmen who commute regularly between Hong Kong and Toronto are called "astronauts" by their community because they seem always to be in space. But what about those who find community in cyberspace perhaps the ultimate exemplar of a community that is not bound by place? A debate rages about whether the proliferation of computer-mediated communication such as the Internet and the Web will destroy community or enhance it. The debates largely rehash longstanding debates about the community question although there is little evidence that most of the debaters have ever considered anything since the advent of computer networks. As philosopher/ catcher/baseball manager Yogi Berra once said, "It's deja vu all over again".
In the final chapter of this book, Wellman and Gulia review the debate about virtual community. They bring to bear on the debate what we know about community networks in general and about interactions on-line in particular. Readers of this preface will not be surprised to learn that on-line communities look much like in-person communities, with specialized, but supportive, relationships flourishing in far-flung, sparsely-connected networks. Although virtual communitarians take much opportunity of the ability of computer networks to leap over time and space, many online interactions continue to be with people who are seen in-person at work or at leisure. These, after all, are the people with whom most of us have to deal with routinely, and computer-mediated communication provides just another means to connect with them conveniently. Despite the dazzling portrayals of virtual worlds whose denizens only meets on-line, in reality, most relationships combine in-person with computer-mediated contact. The advent of still another means of communication does not mean that life as we have known it will cease to exist.
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