Networks Of Personal Relationships Research Articles

Stability of the personal relationship networks in a longitudinal study of middle school students

The personal network of relationships is structured in circles of friendships, that go from the most intense relationships to the least intense ones. While this is a well established result, little is known about the stability of those circles and their evolution in time. To shed light on this issue, we study the temporal evolution of friendships among teenagers during two consecutive academic years by means of a survey administered on five occasions. We show that the first two circles, best friends and friends, can be clearly observed in the survey but also that being in one or the other leads to more or less stable relationships. We find that being in the same class is one of the key drivers of friendship evolution. We also observe an almost constant degree of reciprocity in the relationships, around 60%, a percentage influenced both by being in the same class and by gender homophily. Not only do our results confirm the mounting evidence supporting the circle structure of human social networks, but they also show that these structures persist in time despite the turnover of individual relationships—a fact that may prove particularly useful for understanding the social environment in middle schools.

Siblings as Overlooked Potential for Care and Support Across Households and Borders

The growing numbers of Lithuanian families living across borders have prompted the reflection on family relations through the lens of the need for care and support of dependent children and elderly parents. The authors of this article expand the analysis of family lives in the migration context beyond child–parent relationships and shift the attention to understudied areas where sibling relationships are located. Sibling relationships are considered embedded within the family and the wider network of personal relationships. This article builds on the personal networks approach to examine the position of siblings in the personal networks of Lithuanian family members and draws on a toolbox of analytical concepts provided by the solidarity approach to disclose how sibling relationships could come into play in the case of need. The analysis of statistical data and two surveys carried out in Lithuania as part of the research project funded by the Research Council of Lithuania enabled the authors to uncover different layers of involvement of siblings in “doing families” across households and borders and to highlight the gendered patterns of support expectations towards siblings if/when the need of elderly or child care would arise in the migration context. The research data provide empirical evidence that sibling relationships could be affected by differentiated mobility experiences of family members and the re‐definition of family roles due to newly emerging multi‐local interactions. Cross‐border family practices create new patterns of family relationships and an “intimate, but different” type of solidarity, common to Lithuanian residents with prior migration experience.

Communication as a Factor of Interpersonal Interaction and Manifestation of Empathy

This paper reveals a way to communicate at the level of empathy, which is the leading activity in the interaction of people. Communication gives a person the necessary information for the perception and understanding of another person. Communication is the bridge for building interpersonal relationships. If there is no communication in the world, it will be an unimaginable world. Communication skills allow us to live openly, share humanely, put people first, and fully enjoy freedom, harmony, and equality in interpersonal interactions. It is easy to imagine how closed, boring it would be if there were no communication between people. The modern world is a world of communication, through communication we can expand the network of personal relationships and develop a support system in interpersonal relationships, make communication useful, simple and enjoyable, make the interlocutor feel your respect and understanding, quickly inspire others to your understanding, allow others to voluntarily bring more help and develop mutually beneficial cooperation relationship; in addition, it can avoid unnecessary disputes between people, do not hurt the feelings of both parties, reduce the pressure caused by misunderstanding, and overcome anger and fear, shyness and other harmful emotions, and promote physical health. Communication is like a ray of sunshine in the dark, making everything alive and dynamic.

At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C by Tamika Y. Nunley

Reviewed by: At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C by Tamika Y. Nunley Joseph P. Reidy (bio) At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. By Tamika Y. Nunley. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 254. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $27.95.) Tamika Nunley’s At the Threshold of Liberty examines African American women’s struggles to achieve freedom and equality in the District of Columbia during the nineteenth century. Before the Civil War, slavery framed these efforts; then, in very short order, everything changed. Nunley offers a character-rich account of ordinary women who persistently sought to escape oppressive circumstances. She views their actions as evidence of “self-making,” in which “enslaved women plotted, dreamed, imagined, and created ideas about themselves, as well as the people they knew, and the places in which they lived” (2). Present in the capital city from the beginning, enslaved women persistently sought to rise above the status of property and assert their [End Page 269] personhood, and in the process they made the district “a contested site of liberty” (39). Women’s overt demonstrations of self-making often challenged slavery directly. As early as 1815, the enslaved woman Ann Williams leaped from a second-floor window to avoid removal to Georgia. Three decades later, the sisters Mary and Emily Edmonson joined seventy-five other enslaved people in an ill-fated attempt to escape the city in the schooner Pearl, a case that won international notoriety. Freedom-seeking women also took to the courts, and Nunley’s account of their exploits reinforces the findings of such recent studies as Kelly Kennington’s In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (2017) and William Thomas III’s A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War (2020). When successful, such actions dramatically changed the lives of plaintiffs and their families. The failures could have far-reaching implications, as the case of the sisters Priscilla and Mina Queen demonstrated. Claiming that the free status of their ancestor Mary Queen entitled them to freedom, they retained the services of Francis Scott Key, a veteran of such pleadings, including those of other descendants of Mary. The matter reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where, in 1813, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled inadmissible the “hearsay evidence” upon which the Queens asserted the free status of their progenitor (74). In one fell swoop, Marshall crushed the sisters’ dreams and those of countless other enslaved persons similarly situated. Between 1830 and 1850, as the district’s total Black population steadily grew from roughly nine thousand to almost fourteen thousand, the free portion soared from under five thousand to more than ten thousand. The free Black community’s growth resulted less from procreation than from self-purchase; once having scrimped and saved to achieve liberty, recipients guarded the prize carefully by creating tight networks of personal relationships and social institutions to protect their status. Nunley notes the importance of education in this effort, led by the pioneering work of Ann Marie Becraft, Sophia Browning, and Alethia Browning Tanner in the early decades of the nineteenth century. These women instilled in the daughters of families “with aspirations for social mobility” the necessary qualities of character, deportment, and responsibility (104). Students’ letters to the pioneering white educator Myrtilla Miner, whose Normal School for Colored Girls opened in 1851, reveal their commitments to “thrift, frugality, and hard work” and to “reform and uplift” in the public sphere (113). This quest for self-making, Nunley argues, encompassed enslaved as well as free Black women, as the example of Elizabeth Keckly illustrates. Having learned custom needlework while enslaved, she eventually [End Page 270] purchased her freedom and settled in Washington, where she became a sought-after dressmaker whose elite clientele included Varina Davis and Mary Todd Lincoln. The Civil War ushered in dramatic and lasting change. Virtually overnight, Washington became an armed camp, and the metaphorical “threshold of liberty” became an actual one. Nunley explores this transformation from two vantage points...

Public Security and Police law in China

The Chinese police performs a wide spectrum of social functions. The first part of this paper presents a daily routine of a district police station in the city of Kunming, Yunnan Province, and the various social functions they perform. Mediation among members of the local community in solving minor conflicts is one of the police’s main functions. Police officers are highly motivated in their work. Their success is measured by the degree of satisfaction of their local community. The methods of Chinese police are unique. Its force lies not so much in the extensiveness of governmental control over the life of ordinary citizens as in the wide network of personal relationships between the police and the members of the Chinese public. This network as well as the variety of functions has a single ultimate goal: public security. The second part of the paper examines the concept of public security in Chinese law. It is impossible to understand the whole of the Chinese legal system in its dynamic without taking into account the normative importance of the concept of public security or public order. In China, public order and public security are synonymous. They are understood differently from the Western legal tradition. In the West, public order is a delineation of freedom of private individuals to act pursuing their own interests. It exists to secure the individual rights and liberties. In China, it is the condition for the stability, greatness and prosperity of the Chinese nation. The third part of the paper examines the relationship between public security and human rights. It is argued that the criticism of China by the Western human rights activists fails to understand the Chinese perspective. The Chinese police’s measures restricting individual freedoms should not be understood as the violation of human rights, on the contrary, it is a protection of the majority’s essential right to public order. The idea of public security in the work of Chinese police is not simply an ideological slogan, it is an essential principle of the Chinese legal system which invigorates and innerves the work of the Chinese police.

In Good Company? Personal Relationships, Network Embeddedness, and Social Inclusion

How do individuals’ networks of personal relationships affect their social in‐ and exclusion? Researchers have shown that micro‐level, informal relationships can be highly consequential for social inclusion, but in complex, contradictory ways: Personal networks reflect the degree of relational exclusion and protect against (other forms of) exclusion, but they also erode in conditions of exclusion and reproduce exclusion. While network researchers have widely studied some of these mechanisms, they have yet to embrace others. Therefore, this thematic issue reconsiders the complex relationship between personal networks and social inclusion. It offers a unique vantage point by bringing together researchers who work with different marginalised social groups, typically studied separately: refugees, transnational migrants, indigenous people, older people, people experiencing poverty, LGBT people, and women who have experienced domestic violence. This combination allows us to detect commonalities and differences in network functioning across historically excluded groups. This editorial lays the theoretical groundwork for the thematic issue and discusses the key contributions of the seventeen articles that compose the issue. We call for more attention to relationship expectations, the reciprocity of support flows, and contextual embeddedness, and question universally adopted theoretical binaries such as that of bonding and bridging social capital.

System-level barriers to personal recovery in mental health: qualitative analysis of co-productive narrative dialogues between users and professionals.

No co-productive narrative synthesis of system-level facilitators and barriers to personal recovery in mental illness has been undertaken. To clarify system-level facilitators and barriers to personal recovery of people with mental illness. Qualitative study guided by thematic analysis. Data were collected through one focus group, which involved seven service users and three professionals. This group had 11 meetings, each lasting 2 h at a local research institute, between July 2016 to January 2018. The analysis yielded three themes: barriers inhibiting positive interaction within personal relationship networks, roots of barriers from mental health systems and the social cultural context, and possible solutions to address the roots. Barriers were acknowledged as those related to sense of safety, locus of control within oneself and reunion with self. The roots of barriers were recognised within mental health services, including system without trauma sensitivity, lack of advocacy support and limited access to psychosocial approaches. Roots from social cultural context were also found. There were no narratives relating to facilitators. A possible solution was to address the roots from systems. Social cultural change was called for that makes personalised goals most valued, with an inclusive design that overcomes stigma, to achieve an open and accepting community. The analysis yielded system-level barriers specific to each recovery process. Roots of barriers that need transformation to facilitate personal recovery were identified within mental health services. Social interventions should be further explored to translate the suggested social cultural changes into action.

Kinship, Factions and Survival in Pakistani Politics

Abstract Pakistan’s political volatility is well known and oft cited as a cause for concern both regionally and internationally. The state is accused of adopting duplicitous tactics and fostering violent paramilitary organizations in its efforts to undermine Indian hegemony and internal opposition. From the outside, the persistent functioning of the state can sometimes appear to be a mystery. Managing chronic conflicting adversarial relations over a sustained period of time demands particular social and political tools that must be resilient while ensuring robust reproduction of particular types of shared interests. Such social and political tools are diverse and operate to generate both stability and instability in state political institutions. The political networks of individuals and groups that actively seek to control and manipulate state institutions are formed through different types of relationship, but one of the most publicly visible is marriage. Marriage networks offer opportunities for indirect alliances through children, siblings and other kin members in ways that need not threaten ideologically rooted affiliations, such as those created through shared political party membership. In this working paper, we focus on the communicative potential of such marriage networks through comparing village networks of landowners and the families who engage actively in electoral politics in Punjab, Pakistan. Although these findings are based on more than two decades of research carried out in rural and urban Pakistan, they remain partial, because Pakistani politics is anything but tidy or simply. Nevertheless, any attempt to analyze Pakistani politics that neglects the impact of the complex personal relationship networks is unlikely to satisfactorily explain or even describe the current political situation of the country.

Memoir of a Republican Royalist: Gouverneur Morris, Chronicler and Actor of the French Revolution

The Paris sojourn of the author of A Diary of the French Revolution is possibly the most fascinating period of his eventful life. As George Washington's informant and emissary (official and unofficial) in both Paris and London, Gouverneur Morris discreetly contributed to the United States' policy toward France and England. Upon his arrival in Paris in February 1789, Morris became the privileged witness of the outbreak of the French Revolution, of which he would become an invaluable chronicler and a discreet actor for five years. A self-appointed advisor on revolutionary matters, he would interfere in French politics as a republican royalist of sorts and become the darling of the constitutional noblesse and the Jacobins' bête noire. From 1792 to 1794, he served as minister plenipotentiary of the United States. As the only foreign diplomat to remain in Paris during the Reign of Terror, Morris judiciously used his astonishing network of personal relationships with the various factions to defend American interests and to help his compatriots involuntarily caught in the maelstrom of sanguinary ideological excesses. This article re-examines Gouverneur Morris's participation in the second earth-shaking upheaval of the late eighteenth century and ponders the New York revolutionist's reasons for involvement, as well as the nature and significance of that engagement.

Perceptions of production and the retailing and marketing of quality metalware in eighteenth-century England

ABSTRACTThe expansion of the metalware trade in England in the eighteenth century, and the rise of regional manufacturing towns such as Birmingham and Sheffield, challenged the perception of quality metalware. In particular, the introduction of new products and materials and the utilisation of flexible organisations of production gave the consumer greater choice and enhanced the public curiosity in manufacturing and innovation. These changes in production impacted on the marketing, and consequently the retailing and consumption, of metalware. Recent historiography has explored how individual retailers constructed their reputations for trustworthiness, as brokers of quality and taste. However, within the metalware trade in particular, the producer–retailer maintained an important role, a conspicuous presence in advertisements, and a crucial influence in the perception of quality. By looking more closely at marketing strategies, this article sheds light on the metalware trade and how consumer goods were marketed in the eighteenth century. Not only did the marketing of metalware involve the careful use of language and imagery in increasingly sophisticated methods of advertising in print, from newspaper advertisements and trade cards to trade directories, but also the design of shop spaces, networks of personal relationships, and the objects themselves.

‘We’re In This Together:’ neoliberalism and the disruption of the coach/athlete hierarchy in CrossFit

CrossFit is a growing model of fitness that defines itself in opposition to conventional fitness practices. “Specializing in not specializing”, CrossFit aims to provide a General Physical Preparedness programme sustainable and scalable across an athlete’s life course. “Fitness” is achievable through “constantly varied high intensity functional movements performed across broad time and modal domains”. A differential modality of time is operational in CrossFit, which includes the “clock time” of earlier eras but is largely characterised by the “network time” that makes CrossFit omnipresent. Characterised by the neoliberal rhetoric of self-improvement and individual responsibility, CrossFit takes these ideas one step further by extending its practice and philosophy to every aspect of an athlete’s life, including their network of personal relationships. CrossFit’s lack of specialisation and articulation within network time function to shift the role of the coach from central authority to one who performs affective, emotional labour and forms of a “relationship” that involves supporting each individual athlete in the achievement of their own goals inside and outside “the box”.

Agent-based Social Network Model of Construction through Analysis of Japanese General Social Survey Data

This research attempts to construct an intimacy-based social network model by the analysis of all types of personal relationship networks in the real world based on the Japanese General Social Survey, and apply the network model in simulations of social phenomena. We conducted an agent-based simulation to build this social network based on a virtual city model, achieved by geographic information and census systems. Immunization awareness diffusion in the constructed social network is shown in this paper as an example of the social phenomena simulation. In addition, we aim to expand the application of this social network model in future social simulation research.

From Personal Network to Institution Building: The Lifanyuan, Gift Exchange and the Formalization of Manchu–Mongol Relations

The Qing emperors, who ruled over China from 1644 to 1911, managed to bring large parts of Inner Asia under their control and extended the territory of China to an unprecedented degree. This paper maintains that the political technique of patronage with its formalized language, its emphasis on gift exchange and expressions of courtesy is a useful concept for explaining the integration of Inner Asian confederations into the empire. By re-interpreting the obligations of gift exchange, the Qing transformed the network of personal relationships, which had to be reinforced and consolidated permanently, into a system with clearly defined rules. In this process of formalization, the Lifanyuan, the Court for the Administration of the Outer Regions, played a key role. While in the early years of the dynasty, it was responsible for collecting and disseminating information concerning the various patronage relationships with Inner Asian leaders, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries its efforts were directed at standardizing and streamlining the contacts between ethnic minorities and the state. Through the Lifanyuan, the rules and principles of patronage were maintained in a modified form even in the later part of the dynasty, when the Qing exercised control in the outer regions more directly. The paper provides an explanation for the longevity and cohesiveness of the multi-ethnic Qing Empire. Based on recently published Manchu and Mongol language archival material and the Maussian concept of gift exchange, the study sheds new light on the changing self-conception of the Qing emperors.

Embedding the Stranger: Ethnic Categories and Cultural Differences in Social Networks

Ethnic categories and cultural differences are rooted in the structure of social networks. The segregation of migrant groups in networks of personal relationships determines the extent to which cultural differences can be bridged and the salience of ethnic categories in multicultural societies. Drawing on diverse theoretical strands from symbolic interactionism, social anthropology and Norbert Elias's figurational sociology to the relational sociology of Harrison White, Charles Tilly and others, the article aims at a network theoretical account of inter-ethnic relations, resonating with empirical research on personal networks of migrants. Alfred Schütz's Stranger, Robert Park's Marginal Man and Norbert Elias and John Scotson's Established and Outsiders as the emblematic figures of the sociology of migration are reconstructed in this framework as a common theoretical ground.

Corporate social responsibility among SMEs in Italy

Much of the scholarly discussion on CSR has focused on large corporations even though small and medium enterprises (SMEs) constitute the bulk of businesses in many countries of the world. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 99.9% of the corporations in Italy are SMEs employing fewer than 250 people. This study sought to explore the CSR among SMEs including whether they practice CSR as a strategic function, who the main stakeholders were for their CSR activities, the drivers of CSR, and the motivations to engage in CSR. Data were collected from three sources: a survey of executives of a sample of 105 SMEs; qualitative in-depth interviews of the owner–managers of five SMEs and élite interviews with opinion leaders. The sample organizations practiced CSR mainly through informal, internally oriented and relational methods with very little, if any, managerial and strategic approach. A large number of sample organizations viewed employees as the most important stakeholders for CSR communication whereas customers, suppliers, and business partners trailed far behind. Interestingly, the media, government, NGOs, and unions were relegated to the bottom of the list. Networks of personal relationships (including that of owner–managers and top executives) were frequently used to conduct CSR activities.

The capability of fundamental values and guānxi to reduce negative external effects of Chinese agriculture

Abstract China is the world's largest producer and consumer of agricultural products, but the intensive agriculture contributes in a remarkable manner to environmental problems. Since environmental protection has recently become a popular issue in China, the government attaches great importance to the formulation of laws and regulations. Accordingly, China faces serious challenges inter alia in the accomplishment of effective agricultural training, environmentally sensitive farming and especially in the farmers' willingness to adopt optimised farming approaches. In order to promote a sustainable adaption of optimised agricultural techniques, farmers' behaviour and their production decisions are crucial. Based on a social–psychological approach of individual behaviour, this contribution endeavours to close a considerable gap in analysing the Chinese farmers' fundamental value positions and their social fallback system, namely personal relationship networks called guānxi. Next to the theoretical framework, ...

Short- and long-term effects in the school system of a research immersion experience for science educators: An example from ANDRILL (Antarctic Geological Drilling)

Since its first field season (2006–2007), the ANDRILL (Antarctic Geological Drilling) program has implemented an innovative educational and public outreach (EPO) program known as ARISE (ANDRILL Research Immersion for Science Educators), which has actively involved a group of selected educators in every phase of the research, from participation in field activities to discussion of the scientific results. This method of research immersion has led to an impressive list of achievements, including the development of quality outreach initiatives and diverse educational materials, the involvement of a large number of schools using these resources, the creation of an international network of strongly motivated polar geoscience educators, and the realization of new and unexpected professional opportunities for educators. In Italy this program initiated a specific project (progettosmilla.it), in accordance with the objectives of the ARISE Program. Thanks to the use of both a wide range of instruments (online and material) and the network of personal relationships provided by teachers involved in the program, ARISE has resulted in many short-term accomplishments. The development of new partnerships with local and national institutions has led to a number of middle- and long-term processes, rarely seen in similar EPO projects, resulting in the attainment of other goals. Research immersion experiences promote close interactions between teachers and scientists, and provide the potential for accomplishing other long-term educational outcomes. The shared development of educational resources by scientists and educators through ARISE has created an opportunity to advance scientific education within schools and, through outreach, in the general populace.

Building Relationships for Business in Taiwanese Hostess Clubs: the Psychological and Social Processes of Guanxi Development

Guanxi refers to personal ties between individuals as well as to an individual's whole network of personal relationships. Most studies of business guanxi have focused on how guanxi may be used to achieve business goals and little attention has been paid to the process of guanxi development. We examined this process in a particular context commonly believed to be important for building business relationships in Taiwan: hostess clubs. We used an indigenous psychological framework to conduct a qualitative study in order to fully capture the participants' own perspectives of these processes. The participants were 43 Taiwanese men (mean age = 38.5) with a range of occupations. The results highlight the psychological and social processes associated with building guanxi for business in hostess clubs. The main purpose of socializing was to bond with and test other men by demonstrating a facility with the social etiquette and exchanging mianzi (face) and renqing (favours). Most participants said that the practice was helpful to their jobs or was part of their job description. The implications for women of the results are discussed.

The Mother Benefactress and the Sacred Battalion: Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, the Editing Commission, and the Emancipation of the Serfs

This article argues that Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna made a decisive contribution to the Emancipation of the Serfs through the political battles she waged from 1855 to 1861. Using her position as a Grand Duchess, her salon and her relationship with her nephew Alexander II, Elena was able to provide support and guidance for Alexander's desire for emancipation and for those who wished for real as a opposed to a nominal emancipation of the serfs. Elena's contribution has gone largely unnoticed because the gendered conception of politics in imperial Russia had no place for a woman. That ideology, however, did not reflect the complete reality of politics in imperial Russia which revolved around the person of the emperor both in his capacity as an autocrat and as a man in the centre of a network of personal relationships of which royal women were an important, but unacknowledged, part. Elena's position close to the throne, her exception skills and abilities, and her desire to help the process of emancipation allowed her to take an active part in that fight. She provided an organizing centre for all those on the Editing Commission who shared her view, was able to arrange access for them to the emperor in a context in which he willingly engaged with them on the emancipation, and finally she used her own growing influence over Alexander to ensure his continued support for the Commission and its work. This article in reconstructing Elena's role in the political sphere gives due recognition to her unjustly neglected contribution to the emancipation and broadens our understanding of politics in imperial Russia.

Eleanor Roosevelt: transformative first lady

Presiding in the White House longer than any other first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt championed the downtrodden as she traveled the globe, yet she was a maze of contradictions an idealist who carried on a moneymaking career that depended on her position and a conventional-appearing wife and mother who found emotional succor from intense relationships outside her family. This book cuts through those contradictions to reveal how Eleanor operated, both in and out of public view, to advance the causes in which she believed by participating in the political process. Although previous books have dealt with Eleanor Roosevelt, this is the first to focus on her White House years. Maurine Beasley, a scholar with extensive knowledge of Eleanor's life and times, provides a detailed examination of the innovative first lady that will enlighten those who think they already know her. Rich with detail, it effectively links her social activism from her early life, through the White House years, and to her work after FDR's presidency. From the ways in which Eleanor earned a living to the domestic arrangements in the White House, Beasley is an insightful and informed guide to the historical issues surrounding Mrs. Roosevelt's performance, describing how she took the ambiguous position of first lady and transformed it into an institution of the American political system. Beasley leaves no stone unturned as she casts fresh light on Eleanor's relations with Franklin, the people around her, and the causes she championed. She explores how personal relationships led Mrs. Roosevelt to hone political skills that redefined the position of the first lady for years to come. And as she enlarges our understanding of Eleanor's use of media to disseminate her political views, Beasley illuminates her complex network of personal relationships, finances, contributions to New Deal programs, and extensive publicity commitments. Here is a book that will reward general readers interested in Eleanor's historical importance and inform specialists looking for judicious appraisals of her words, her deeds, and the controversies that surrounded her. Anyone interested in the enigma that was Eleanor Roosevelt will discover here a rich trove of essential information for understanding how this dynamic and troubled woman succeeded in transforming the institution of the first lady during a dozen years of activism and commitment.