Informal Social Ties Research Articles

SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO? INFORMAL SOCIAL TIES AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP CHOICES: EVIDENCE FROM THE MUTUAL FUND INDUSTRY.

The article discusses informal social ties and entrepreneurship decisions within the mutual fund industry. Many entrepreneurs come from organizations that are already existing and it is not well-kn...

Predicting social isolation among geriatric psychiatry patients

This exploratory study examines factors associated with isolation from informal social ties among geriatric psychiatry inpatients. Specifically, it examines the associations of diagnoses, psychiatric history, and measures of current functioning with social isolation. Analyses rely upon data derived from the Resident Assessment Instrument-Mental Health (RAI-MH), which is a patient focused, multidimensional, comprehensive assessment instrument designed to be a component of a larger, integrated health information system linking mental health with home care, long-term care, acute care, rehabilitation, and palliative care. Controlling for age, multivariate results show that being married or widowed was associated with a lower odds of being isolated. Mood disorders were also associated with a lower odds of isolation, while a history of a personality disorder and a personal biography of institutionalization were both clearly associated with an increased odds for isolation. Although significant bivariate predictors in the multivariate model, both schizophrenic and organic diagnoses failed to reach statistical significance. In addition, patients hospitalized at an earlier age and/or predicted to have a longer stay on the current admission were much less likely to have contact with informal supports. Of the study variables indexing functional status, only activities of daily living (ADLs) remained a significant predictor for isolation in the final multivariate model. The analyses demonstrate the detrimental effects of an earlier life experience with mental illness. Having an earlier age of illness onset may lead to a potentially greater impairment in establishing and maintaining informal social ties throughout the life course into older age. These analyses reinforce the need for comprehensive assessment of patients on admission and over time.

Lucy Spence Morice: ‘mother of kindergartens’ in South Australia

Existing histories of the free kindergarten movement in South Australia scantily acknowledge the key role of Lucy Spence Morice in helping to found the Kindergarten Union (KUSA) in 1905 and subsequently guiding the organisation through financially troubled times, internal conflict with respect to the independence of the Training College (Adelaide KTC) from Education Department control, changes of directorship, and in accordance with its original mission. This article seeks to restore Lucy Spence Morice to a place in South Australian annals alongside that of her distinguished aunt Catherine Helen Spence: teacher, journalist, author, Unitarian Church preacher, philanthropist, political and social reformer, self‐styled ‘new woman’ of the late nineteenth century, and to niece Lucy a dear friend, mentor and inspirational role model. In the light of fresh evidence contained in the papers of Mrs Marjorie Caw (an early KTC graduate), and informed by the work of Caine, Lewis, Ryan, and Goodman and Harrop most especially, it re‐assesses Mrs Morice’s contribution to kindergarten reform from a feminist revisionist historical perspective. I utilise biographical methods and network analysis in order to point up the genesis of Lucy’s zeal for the cause of kindergarten education; also to argue that her informal but expansive social ties, plus her links to professional women and other activists in the fields of child health, welfare and education were central to her work for the Kindergarten Union.

Avoidance as the First Choice of Default Management: Challenges in Overseas Korean Organizations

Avoidance becomes the default management style for dealing with cross‐cultural conflict in overseas Korean organizations rather than a collaborative style. We argue in this conceptual paper, this is due to the absence of personalized informal social ties that are utilized in domestic Korean organizations to progress information sharing and conflict resolution, and to the absence of a structured and transparent conflict resolution mechanism understood and accepted by both Korean managers and overseas workers.

Lessons from the Street: Informal Education-Based Social Ties Building and the Danger of Pre-Scription

Résumé Graeme Tiffany traite des recherches récentes sur le travail de proximité des jeunes. Tout en identifiant les caractéristiques d’une pratique correcte, il attire l’attention sur les tensions créées par la politique sociale. Les éléments bureaucratiques paraissent à la fois gêner la capacité des travailleurs à faciliter la construction de liens sociaux de voisinage et, dans certaines circonstances, augmente l’exclusion sociale des jeunes mêmes avec lesquels ces praticiens devaient travailler.

The social distribution of risk at work: Acute injuries and physical assaults among healthcare workers working in a long-term care facility

The roles of informal social ties in affecting healthcare workers’ risk of injury and assault were investigated in a long-term care facility for the elderly in the US. The original hypothesis was that nurses and healthcare assistants who integrated more with their coworkers would have lower risk. A crude measure of familiarity and social integration with coworkers was constructed from staff attendance records. This variable, which indicates working a floor and shift one has routinely worked on in the past, was associated with a moderate increase in risk of being injured after controlling for lifting demands and a fairly strong increased risk of being assaulted after controlling for resident combativeness. An interaction between social integration and job title was found. The primary associations were in the opposite direction of what was expected. The results suggest that social forces among healthcare workers shape the distribution of risk among workers in a manner more complex than some theories of social integration have suggested. New hypotheses are proposed to explore how social norms and expectations affect the way workers interact with each other and shape the distribution of risk among workgroup members.

Jeong exchange and collective leadership in Korean organizations

How does the Korean management system work with open interaction and without excessive power abuse, in spite of the emphasis on authority and hierarchy in Korean society? This paper explicates the concept of jeong exchange, an emotional support mechanism based on informal social ties, as the basis of social capital in Korean collectives (woori). Jeong exchange is first described and then contrasted with related concepts in the other major Confucian societies of China and Japan. It is then used to develop the notion of “collective leadership” to describe the nature and process of Korean leadership.

Parochial corruption

Enforcement problems are frequently acute in illegal transactions such as bribery. However, if a government official and a member of the public share informal social or economic ties, this may enable them to enforce bribe transactions by “linking the games”. As a result, officials’ incentives to engage in corruption may be affected by the social structure of the society in which they are embedded. We show that governments wishing to deter parochial corruption will usually prefer to punish only the official receiving the bribe, not the bribe-payer.

Social networks and quality of life for long-term survivors of leukemia and lymphoma

This study examined the relationship between personal and medical characteristics and quality of life (QOL) for long-term survivors (LTS) of leukemia and lymphoma, and how social networks influence this relationship. Fifty three LTS, at least 10 years postdiagnosis, were administered a standardized psychometric instrument, the Quality of Life--Cancer Survivors, to assess multidimensional aspects of QOL. Social network characteristics were measured by items assessing social support satisfaction, use of supportive care services, network size, and reliance on formal and informal social ties. A hierarchical regression model explained 52.4% of the variance in QOL for the final model, including all important predictors. Social support satisfaction (beta=0.393, p=0.001) and the use of supportive care services (beta=-0.262, p=0.047) significantly predicted QOL after controlling for confounding variables. Social network structures (including network size and reliance on formal and informal social ties) were indirectly associated with QOL through the use of supportive care services. The results indicate that the use of supportive care services, satisfaction with social support, network size, and reliance on formal and informal social ties affect QOL for long-term cancer survivors. Enhancing cancer survivors' social networks may ultimately improve their QOL.

Trust: A Concept Too Many

Research on now forms a prominent part of the research agenda in history and the social sciences. Although this research has generated useful insights, the idea of trust has been used so widely and loosely that it risks creating more confusion than clarity. This essay argues that to the extent that scholars have a clear idea of what trust actually means, the concept is, at least for economic questions, superfluous: the useful parts of the idea of trust are implicit in older notions of information and the ability to impose sanctions. I trust you in a transaction because of what I know about you, and because of what I can have done to you should you cheat me. This observation does not obviate what many scholars intend, which is to embed economic action within a framework that recognizes informal institutions and social ties. I illustrate the argument using three examples drawn from an area where trust has been seen as critical: credit for poor people.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suburban Sprawl, Regional Diffusion, and the Fate of Small Retailers in a Large Retail Environment, 1977–1996

Research on the decline of public life in the United States has largely overlooked the role of Main Street retailers that provide public spaces for the maintenance of informal social ties. A central factor shaping the viability of small retailers is the development of big box chain stores that offer one-stop shopping and price out smaller competitors. Although prior studies have considered the transition from small to large retailers as a national phenomenon, arguing for the importance of place effects, we document the spatial variation in this process for nonmetropolitan counties in the United States. We hypothesize that the economic downturns in agriculture and manufacturing during the 1980s, combined with suburban sprawl into nonmetropolitan counties, facilitated the decline of small retailing in specific locales. Employing data from the 1977–1996 U.S. County Business Patterns, we test our hypotheses concerning the spatial variability in the decline of small retailing. Our results point to a marked decline in the number of establishments and employment in selected retail industries for nonmetropolitan counties near metropolitan areas in the South, Midwest, and West. These findings highlight the importance of considering local business enterprises as an important dimension of public life and local leadership in community affairs. We conclude our study by outlining the social consequences of the decline of small retail activity and suggest directions for future research.

Employment status, social ties, and caregivers’ mental health

The purpose of this study of mid-life and older women was to assess the relation between informal care provision and depressive symptoms, taking into account concurrent demands on women's time (including multiple caregiving roles and employment outside the home) as well as participants’ access to potentially supportive social ties. This cross-sectional study included women ages 46–71, free from major disease, who provided complete health and social information in the 1992 Nurses’ Health Study follow-up survey ( n=61,383). In logistic regression models predicting depressive symptoms, we examined the interaction between employment outside the home and informal care provision for a disabled or ill spouse or parent. We also investigated level of social ties, measured with the Berkman–Syme Social Network Index, as a potential modifier of the association between informal care provision and depressive symptoms. In all analyses, higher weekly time commitment to informal care for a spouse or parent was associated with increased risk of depressive symptoms. This relationship persisted whether women were not employed outside the home, were employed full-time, or were employed part-time. Higher weekly time commitment to informal care provision was associated with increased risk of depressive symptoms whether women were socially integrated or socially isolated. However, both informal care provision and social ties were potent independent correlates of depressive symptoms. Therefore, women who reported high spousal care time commitment and few social ties experienced a dramatic elevation in depressive symptoms, compared to women with no spousal care responsibilities and many social ties (OR for depressive symptoms=11.8; 95% CI 4.8, 28.9). We observed the same pattern among socially isolated women who cared for their parent(s) many hours per week, but the association was not as strong (OR for depressive symptoms=6.5; 95% CI 3.4, 12.7). In this cross-sectional study, employment status did not seem to confer additional mental health risk or benefit to informal caregivers, while access to extensive social ties was associated with more favorable caregiver health outcomes.

Social Capital and Participation in Community Improvement Activities by Elderly Residents in Small Towns and Rural Communities*

Abstract This study critically reviews theoretical concepts and measurements of social capital and tests hypotheses that elaborate how four dimensions of social capital (informal social ties, formal social ties, trust, and norms of collective action) and sense of community are related to participation in community improvement activities for elderly residents in small towns and rural communities. Mail surveys of 2,802 elders in 99 small towns and rural communities in Iowa reveal that many elders are actively involved in their community. Social capital and sense of community are very important in predicting elderly participation in community improvement activities, but they relate differently to elderly community involvement. Formal ties and sense of community have much stronger relationships with community involvement than informal ties and norms of collective action. Generalized trust is not significantly related to elderly community involvement.

Information Sources for New Ventures in the Turkish Clothing Export Industry

Recently "born global" firms have received considerable attention in the entrepreneurship and international business literature. Managers leading these new ventures typically face substantial resource constraints when seeking information critical to internationalization. This paper examines how the owner/operators of new ventures in the Turkish clothing export industry utilize their informal and formal social networks to acquire the information they need to export successfully. Field research and a survey of 250 Turkish clothing firm owners was conducted in Istanbul, Turkey to explore this issue. Findings indicate that informal social ties – particularly friends and family connections – are key sources of information for new-venture firm owners in this industry. Two formal organizations provide export information to entrepreneurs in the Turkish clothing industry, but only one was found to be easily accessible to new-venture firm owners: the Istanbul Textile and Clothing Exporters' Union (ITKIB). OLS regression results reveal that new venture firm owners' perceptions of ITKIB's importance can be explained by their perceived importance of various kinds of export-oriented information offered by this organization. In particular, perceived importance of export-law, market-research, and export-process information drive their perceptions of the importance of their ITKIB membership.

Formality and Informality in Offshore Financial Centres

One of the central features of an offshore financial centre (OFC) is that it operates outside of the customary regulatory systems experienced within mainstream 'onshore' banking systems. OFCs are thus limited in terms of formal regulatory bodies and formal rules and regulations which are in place. They tend to rely upon informal networks and social ties so as to reach 'common sense' understandings of correct and incorrect behaviour. In this article, Donaghy points out that these 'common sense' understandings of social control have come under significant strain with many OFCs as they increasingly play host to growing numbers of international banks and financial institutions with varying conceptions about the nature of structural control and the meaning of rules and regulations. Many OFCs are thus replacing these informal strategies with more formalised approaches in the hope of creating a 'level playing field' amongst the centres' institutions. The aim of this article is thus not to pontificate about the best way forward for these centres, merely to investigate the sociological processes operating beneath this informal to formal transition.

Neighborhood disorder, fear, and mistrust: the buffering role of social ties with neighbors.

This paper proposes that individuals who report that they live in neighborhoods characterized by disorder--by crime, vandalism, graffiti, danger, noise, dirt, and drugs--have high levels of fear and mistrust. It further proposes that an individual's alliances and connections with neighbors can buffer the negative effects of living in a neighborhood characterized by disorder on fear and mistrust. Results from a representative sample of 2482 Illinois residents collected by telephone in 1995 support the propositions. Living in a neighborhood with a lot of perceived disorder significantly affects mistrust and the fear of victimization, adjusting for sociodemographic characteristics. Perceived neighborhood disorder and social ties significantly interact: informal social ties with neighbors reduce the fear- and mistrust-producing effects of disorder. However, formal participation in neighborhood organizations shows little buffering effect.

Social relations in a chronic care hospital: a whole network study of patients, family and employees

Institutionalization is associated with the loss of informal social ties because isolation in the community increases the risk of admission and/or admission to a facility increases the risk that ties will be severed. The literature on social relationships with institutions has been limited by the use of biased samples, simplistic measures and exclusion of patients unable to respond to verbal or written questionnaires. The methodological aspects of a whole network study of chronic care hospital patients are discussed with a particular emphasis on network sampling and non-response bias. The substantive aspects of the present analyses focus in the different patterns of relationships of patients, family and employees in a hospital setting.

Multiple Networks and Mobilization in the Paris Commune, 1871

Although sociologists increasingly recognize the importance of networks in social movement mobilization, efforts to understand networkfactors have been hampered by the operationalization of factors as individual-level variables. I argue that disaggregating relational data into individual-level counts of social ties obscures the crucial issues of structure and multiplexity. I analyze data on insurgency in the Paris Commune of 1871 and show that organizational networks and pre-existing informal networks interacted in the mobilization process, even in thefinal moments of the insurrection. autocorrelation models reveal that enlistment patterns in the Paris National Guard created organizational linkages among residential areas that contributed to solidarity in the insurgent effort, but the efficacy of these linkages depended on the presence of informal social ties rooted in Parisian neighborhoods. Thus the role of networkfactors can only be understood by studying the joint influence offormal and informal social structures on the mobilization process. A decade ago, Snow, Zurcher, and EklandOlson (1980) pointed to the importance of social networks for understanding the mobilization of social movements, but the state of research in this area is still best described as inchoate. Despite widespread acceptance of the idea that network or factors play a role in mobilization or recruitment, only a handful of studies have made genuine progress toward understanding the significance of these factors. A principal reason for this state of affairs is that - often because of data considerations researchers have typically used purely scalar variables to measure networks of social relations. Network effects are examined by simply counting social ties and using these counts as interval variables in regression equations, so that the process by which social ties influence mobilization is analyzed as though it operates exclusively on the individual level. This in turn means that two key issues - structure and multiplexity - have received insufficient consideration in theory and research. My goal is to demonstrate that the effect of social relations on the mobilization of collective action depends on the way in which these relations are structured and, more precisely, on the correspondence between organizational and informal networks. I use data on patterns of insurgency during the Paris Commune of 1871 to show that successful mobilization depended not on the sheer number of ties, but on the interplay between social ties created by insurgent organizations and pre-existing social networks rooted in Parisian neighborhoods. Organizational networks maintained solidarity because they were structured along neighborhood lines. Paradoxically, neighborhood ties even determined the importance of organizational links that cut across neighborhoods. Previous studies have rarely demonstrated that structural properties of relational systems are important for social movements, and there is no discussion in the literature of the ways in which formal and informal networks interact in the mobilization process. In the conclusion, I argue that these issues are best addressed through data collection procedures and analytic strategies that respect the structure of networks rather than reducing networks to individual-level counts of social ties.

Organizational Control in the High School Workplace: A Theoretical Argument

In this article, a new approach is taken to the question of the control of teachers' work. This approach is contrasted with Weberian, loose coupling, and instructional approaches. Using the high school as a grounding case, an argument is made that school workplaces may provide a variety of controls of teachers' work, embedded in the social organization of the school. Trends toward one or another control mechanism are said to depend on variation in school size, the power of students and parents relative to teachers, the division of instructional labor, and informal social ties among teachers.

Extending Families: The Social Networks of Parents and their Children.

Foreword U. Bronfenbrenner Preface Part I. Ideas and Themes: 1. Personal networks in the ecology of human development M. Cochran Part II. Settings, Methods and Illustrations: 2. Settings and methods D. Riley et al 3. The social networks interview L. Gunnarsson 4. Descriptive illustrations M. Cochran and C. R. Henderson, Jr. Part III. The Influences of Race, Class and Culture: 5. Social networks, race and ethnicity W. E. Cross, Jr 6. The social networks of married mothers in four cultures M. Cochran et al 7. The social support networks of single parents: Sweden and the United States M. Cochran and L. Gunnarsson Part IV. Impacts on Perceptions and Performance: 8. Network influences upon perception of the child: solo parenting and social support M. Cochran and C. R. Henderson, Jr. 9. Network influences on father involvement in childrearing D. Riley 10. The social networks of six-year-olds: context, content and consequence M. Cochran and D. Riley Part V. Changes in Networks Over Time: 11. Changes in network resources and relationships over time M. Larner 12. Local residential mobility and its effects on social networks: a cross-cultural comparison M. Larner 13. Formal supports and informal social ties: a case study M. Cochran and C. R. Henderson, Jr. Part VI. Social Networks and Human Development: 14. The network as an environment for human development M. Cochran 15. Environmental factors constraining network development M. Cochran 16. Factors influencing personal social initiative M. Cochran 17. Personal networks and public policy M. Cochran Appendix 1. The social network interviews Endnotes References.