Search

Since Granovetter's path breaking work in the 1970s, there has been much discussion about the relevance of weak ties in finding new jobs and generally getting ahead in society. Subsequent research has found evidence to both support and challenge his original theory. However, concerns have also been expressed about the meaning of this concept. What exactly are 'weak ties', how are they created and what resources flow through them? In my previous work, I have distinguished between horizontal and vertical ties and the relationships and resources available within them. This paper goes further; drawing on new, mixed methods research with Polish migrants, I explore what types of social ties are useful in contexts of deskilling and finding jobs commensurate with qualifications. Interrogating the concept of 'weak ties', I argue that tie strength and ethnic composition are less important than relative social distance and willingness to share valuable resources. I propose that 'strong ties' can also act as vertical bridges (or ladders), while ties which are too 'weak' may lack necessary trust to share latent resources. I consider the importance of a temporal perspective to explore the dynamism and life cycle of ties over time - as some lapse while others strengthen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we focus on highly skilled migration from Zimbabwe to the UK, exploring these migrants' social capital sources/structures and content. In doing so we pay attention to routes of migration and how they shape migrants' networking capabilities and patterns. We further take a Bourdieusian perspective and explore the intersection between social capital and cultural capital in the process of migrants' negotiation of employment opportunities, giving closer attention to how the distinctive habitus associated with being highly skilled migrants from Zimbabwe shape migrants' attitudes towards work. By exploring the interplay between external processes and internalised structures, we bring to the fore the multiple positioning of our participants, who we see not as simply depending on social networks, but as complex actors whose negotiation of employability in the UK is shaped by various factors including intersecting aspects of differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social capital is one of the most widely used (in both scholarly and non-scholarly contexts) and one of the least critically examined concepts in Bourdieu's framework. This article aims at questioning the objectivist standpoint from which the concept of social capital has been developed, by looking into the interpretative processes which shape it. In doing so, it proposes a new understanding of the notion of imagined social capital, which has gained prominence in the literature of the last several years. The contribution of the current paper lays in elaborating on the ways in which the existing notion of imagined social capital can be put in dialogue with Bourdieu's work and in introducing the overlooked, yet fundamental question of otherness into the debate on imagined social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine differences in political engagement among an elite segment of the British population: GBCS respondents who are college-educated, non-routine workers making over £100,000 a year. I show that even though everyone in this group ought to have more than sufficient skills and resources for political engagement, there are still substantial differences by social position. Specifically, postgraduate degrees and higher incomes still differentiate political engagement, and cultural and social capital (as indicated by cultural activities practised, and the occupations people report knowing) differentiate elite political engagement even more strongly. This indicates that social position qua social position - that is, connection to dominant and legitimated ways of being - contributes to a sense of the 'right to speak' that matters as much as or more than costs and resources for facilitating political involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we use the unusually large sample size of the Great British Class Survey to compare rates of social mobility into different elite occupations. We find a distinction between 'traditional' professions, such as law, medicine and finance, which are dominated by the children of higher managers and professionals, and technical or emerging high-status occupations, particularly those related to IT, that appear to recruit more widely. Second, we find that even when the upwardly mobile are successful in entering elite occupations they invariably fail to accumulate the same economic, cultural and social capital as those from privileged backgrounds. While many such differences may be explained by inheritance, we also find that the mobile tend to have considerably lower incomes. Investigating this further we demonstrate that even when controlling for important variables such as schooling, education, location, age, and cultural and social capital, the upwardly mobile in eight occupations - located largely in the business sector - have considerably lower incomes than their higher-origin colleagues. These findings underline the value of analyses of mobility into specific high-status occupations as well as illustrating how, beyond entry, the mobile often face considerable disadvantage within occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the special issue on topics including a survey of conceptualizations of community in the social sciences, social capital, and communal being-ness.

The position of the social sciences within European Union (EU) research policy is fragile. The social sciences have been entangled with the EU integration process throughout the organization's trajectory; still, social sciences have only lately been integrated into EU research policy in a marginal position. Drawing on Bourdieu's generic field analysis, this article analyses the struggles over the position of the social sciences within EU research policies from the early 1990s until today. First, the analysis shows how the social sciences were included in EU research policies with the simultaneous establishment of the European field of social science through the formation of scientific associations, journals and European research infrastructures. Second, it focuses on the struggle over the position of the social sciences in Horizon 2020. This analysis shows how social-science researchers mobilized social and political capital in the efforts to organize and implement the H2020 to ensure the presence of social-science issues and researchers in the programme despite the dominance of other sciences and political issues. Overall, the analysis is a reminder of the generally subordinate position of the social sciences, particularly in EU research policies, but it also shows that well-organized social sciences can participate in organizing research funding and ensure representation of otherwise marginalized research fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intergenerational inequalities in economic security, health and political participation are frequently associated with inequalities in access to social capital. Millennials (those born after 1982) are often regarded as the least civically active generation, suggesting that they have less access to social capital, compared to other generations. Numerous studies have linked the decline of religion with falling social capital, as younger generations are deprived of a valuable source of social interaction; others, however, have claimed the link between the two is spurious because Millennials have developed different ways of interacting with social institutions and each other. Despite various studies exploring links between forms of religious and social capital, the role of religious decline in contributing to the intergenerational inequalities of today remains unclear. This study examines how religious capital is related to social capital for Baby Boomers and Millennials in the UK. Our analysis shows that while lower levels of religious capital are contributing to lower levels of social capital among Millennials, religious activity is also a more effective source of social capital for Millennials than their elders. We discuss possible interpretations of our data, including exploring whether greater religious engagement among Millennials may protect against intergenerational inequality and conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is general agreement on the definition of social capital as the benefits to be derived from social connections, the type of advantages (more effective transacting across all fields versus contacts for personal advantage) and the beneficiaries (community versus individual) identified by social capital scholars differ. This variety can be addressed with a distinction between the so-called schools of cooperation and competition. This article focuses on the former, particularly the work of Robert Putnam. The author uses Nicos Mouzelis's critique of rational choice theory, and his distinction between micro and macro actors, as a diagnostic tool to highlight the shortcomings of Putnam's work and the cooperation school more generally. The author argues that Putnam's notion of bridging social capital as a solution to problems of intolerance and more general social ills is overblown, given that both diverse social networks and increasing tolerance are the result of deeper social processes not analysed by Putnam. In support of this, the article lists a number of ways in which macro actors influence the ability of social networks to form, and once formed, constrain and enable their agency in either a cooperative or competitive direction. It also criticises the tendency of cooperation theorists to generalise the solution of the collective action problem on the micro level to the macro level. Finally, the article emphasises the importance of analysing the interaction between different collective action problems, as well as the connection between cooperation and competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on interviews with 43 Airbnb hosts in Greater Boston to analyze how this novel economic arrangement brings people together across difference. The first central finding is that a majority of the participants express a keen interest in engaging with the Other, by hosting guests of foreign nationalities and cultures, but they also filter for familiar characteristics. This paradox is conceptualized as a preference for the ‘comfortably exotic’ – hosts want difference, but not too much of it. The second central finding is that guest–host interactions generate cosmopolitan capital, i.e., particular forms of social and cultural capital, which suggests that exclusion from the home-sharing economy has opportunity costs on not just economic dimensions, but also on cultural and social dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]