Analysis of social networks is suggested as a tool for linking micro and macro levels of sociological theory. The procedure is illustrated by elaboration of the macro implications of one aspect of small-scale interaction: the strength of dyadic ties. It is argued that the degree of overlap of two individuals' friendship networks varies directly with the strength of their tie to one another. The impact of this principle on diffusion of influence and information, mobility opportunity, and community organization is explored. Stress is laid on the cohesive power of weak ties. Most network models deal, implicitly, with strong ties, thus confining their applicability to small, well-defined groups. Emphasis on weak ties lends itself to discussion of relations between groups and to analysis of segments of social structure not easily defined in terms of primary groups.

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The Strength of Weak Ties

Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localize...

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Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks

of Ph.D. dissertation, University of Haifa, Israel.

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The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited

‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

Since the late 1980s, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has become a well-established field in the social sciences. However, in contrast with some branches of linguistics, CDA is not a discrete academic discipline in the traditional sense, with a fixed set of research methods. The manifold roots of CDA lie in a myriad of disciplines including rhetoric, anthropology, philosophy and cognitive science, to name a few. This four-volume set brings together seminal articles on the subject from varied sources, creating an invaluable roadmap for scholars seeking to consolidate their knowledge of CDA, and of its continued development. Sculpted and edited by a leading voice in the field, this work covers the interdisciplinary roots, the most important approaches and methodologies of CDA, as well as applications in other disciplines in an updated and comprehensive way. Structured thematically, the four volumes cover a wide range of aspects and considerations: Volume One: Histories, Concepts and Interdisciplinarity Volume Two: Theoretical Approaches and Methodologies Volume Three: 'Doing CDA' - Case Studies Volume Four: Applications and Perspectives - New Trends in CDA

https://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/18225/1/94pdf.pdf

Critical Discourse Analysis

For ten years, Herbert J. Gans spent considerable time in four major television and magazine newsrooms, observing and talking to the journalists who choose the national news stories that inform America about itself. Writing during the golden age of journalism. Gans included such headline events as the War on Poverty, the Vietnam War and the protests against it, urban ghetto disorders, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and Watergate. He was interested in the values, professional standards, and the external pressures that shaped journalists' judgments. Deciding What's News has become a classic. A new preface outlines the major changes that have taken place in the news media since Gans first wrote the book, but it also suggests that the basics of news judgment and the structures of news organizations have changed little Gans's book is still the most comprehensive sociological account of some of the country's most prominent national news media. The book received the 1979 Theatre Library Association Award and the 1980 Book Award of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. This is the first work to be published under the Medill School of Journalism's "Visions of the American Press" imprint, a new journalism history series featuring both original volumes and reprints of important classics.

Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time

(1979). Symbolic ethnicity: The future of ethnic groups and cultures in America. Ethnic and Racial Studies: Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 1-20.

Symbolic ethnicity: The future of ethnic groups and cultures in America*

The urban villagers

The Urban Villagers: Group And Class In The Life Of Italian-Americans

‘Second-Generation Decline’ questions the current American faith in the myth of nearly automatic immigrant success. In discussing economic scenarios, positive and negative, for the future of the children of the post-1965 immigrants, it proposes the possibility that a significant number of the children of poor immigrants, especially dark-skinned ones, might not obtain jobs in the mainstream economy. Neither will they be willing — or even able — to take low-wage-long-hour ‘immigrant’ jobs like their parents. As a result they, and young males among them particularly, may join blacks and Hispanics among those already excluded, apparently permanently, from the mainstream economy. The paper also deals with the relations between ethnicity and economic conditions in the US, and with the continued relevance of the assimilation and acculturation processes described by ‘straight-line theory’. This issue, as well as most others discussed in the paper, may also be salient for European countries experiencing immigration, especially those countries with troubled economies.

Herbert J. Gans

Papers

Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time

Symbolic ethnicity: The future of ethnic groups and cultures in America*

The urban villagers

The Urban Villagers: Group And Class In The Life Of Italian-Americans

Second-Generation Decline: Scenarios for the Economic and Ethnic Futures of the Post-1965 American Immigrants