SOCA01H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Mark Granovetter, Georg Simmel, Informal Social Control
Document Summary
Focus: forms of social relationships that underlie and are common to diverse areas of social structure (i. e. diverse purposes of social action) Diad: social relationship between two nodes (individuals, groups, organisations) New elements of social relationship: alliances, mediation, rivalry, etc. A set of ties between individuals (nodes), along which (social and material) resources are exchanged types of ties: unidirectional, reciprocal, redundant, strong and weak. Granovetter: the strength of weak ties is in information flow. Personal social networks overlap: they are connected to each other (unlike groups, networks have no clear identity and boundaries) Sociological proper : unit of analysis is not an individual, but a social relationship. Categories become significant if their defining characteristic is socially significant for structural reasons (knezevic) or it is socially constructed as significant (tepperman) Primary: small; face-to-face contact; members get to know each other well, membership is subjectively important to members(strong emotional ties, long-lasting.