Social Structure Abstracts. The patterned and relatively stable arrangement of roles and statuses found within societies and social institutions. The idea of social structure points out the way in which societies, and institutions within them, exhibit predictable patterns of organization, activity and social interaction.

Social Structure - Abstracts

Social structure and ethnicity - Sociologie Româneasca, 2001, 1-4
Abstract - The paper attempts a theoretical and empirical analysis of the relationship between ethnic affiliation, social stratification and ethnic attitudes in Central and Eastern Europe, and in Romania in particular. In the first part of the paper I examine the main theoretical constructs involved in explaining the relationship between stratification and ethnic affiliation, ethnic stratification and class stratification, and the role of market mechanisms in the dynamics of social and ethnic stratification. In order to validate the proposed hypotheses I use data regarding former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe. For the Romanian case I employ a multilevel analysis by using regional, community and individual level data.

The analysis of empirical data at the national level suggests that a homogenous ethnic composition of a country determines a global orientation of the population towards a less tolerant ethnic attitude. A homogenous ethnic composition at the level of historical regions in the case of Romania is also a favorable environment for ethnic intolerance. Ethnic intolerance tends to be higher in the lower social strata. The relationship between one's social position in the stratification space and one's attitude of ethic intolerance is not a linear one. Regions, types of local and residential communities, and also human and material capital variables emerge as being relevant predictors of ethnic intolerance. - sociologieromaneasca.ro/eng/2001/abstracts/sr2001.a05.htm

Kin Groups and Social Structure - by Roger M., Keesing
Abstract - This text examines the evolution of kinship and social structure. Keesing considers the importance of patrilineal descent and the permutations of descent systems, matrilineal and double descent, alliance systems, cognate descent and bilateral kinship as organizing principles. Relevant analogies and examples are used throughout.

Cross-national Research on Social Structure and Personality - soc.jhu.edu/people/Kohn/410crossnatlres.pdf

Social structure and competition in interfirm networks: the paradox of embeddedness. Uzzi, Brian - Introduction Extract -Administrative Science Quarterly; 3/1/1997.
Twenty-three entrepreneurial firms were analyzed to determine the components of embeddedness that affect the organizational and economic outcomes. Results suggest that embeddedness is a logic which provides positive effects on integrative agreements, complex adaptation, economies of time, and Pareto improvements in allocative efficiency. A framework that clarifies variations of such properties is also presented.
The purpose of this work is to develop a systematic understanding of embeddedness and organization networks. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at 23 entrepreneurial firms, I identify the components of embedded relationships and explicate the devices by which embeddedness shapes organizational and economic outcomes. The findings suggest that embeddedness is a logic of exchange that promotes economies of time, integrative agreements, Pareto improvements in allocative efficiency, and complex adaptation. These positive effects rise up to a threshold, however, after which embeddedness can derail economic performance by making firms vulnerable to exogenous shocks or insulating them from information that exists beyond their network. A framework is proposed that explains how these properties vary with the quality of social ties, the structure of the organization network, and an organization's structural position in the network.
Research on embeddedness is an exciting area in sociology and economics because it advances our understanding of how social structure affects economic life. Polanyi (1957) used the concept of embeddedness to describe the social structure of modern markets, while Schumpeter (1950) and Granovetter (1985) revealed its robust effect on economic action, particularly in the context of interfirm networks, stimulating research on industrial districts (Leung, 1993; Lazerson, 1995), marketing channels (Moorman, Zaltman, and Deshponde, 1992), immigrant enterprise (Portes and Sensenbrenner, 1993), entrepreneurship (Larson, 1992), lending relationships (Podolny, 1994; Sterns and Mizruchi, 1993; Abolafia, 1996), location decisions (Romo and Schwartz, 1995), acquisitions (Palmer et al., 1995), and organizational adaptation (Baum and Oliver, 1992; Uzzi, 1996).
The notion that economic action is embedded in social structure has revived debates about the positive and negative effects of social relations on economic behavior. While most organization theorists hold that social structure plays a significant role in economic behavior, many economic theorists maintain that social relations minimally affect economic transacting or create inefficiencies by shielding the transaction from the market (Peterson and Rajan, 1994). These conflicting views indicate a need for more research on how social structure facilitates or derails economic action. In this regard, Granovetter's (1985) embeddedness argument has emerged as a potential theory for joining economic and sociological approaches to organization theory. As presently developed, however, Granovetter's argument usefully explicates the differences between economic and sociological schemes of economic behavior but lacks its own concrete account of how social relations affect economic exchange. The fundamental statement that economic action is embedded in ongoing social ties that at times facilitate and at times derail exchange suffers from a theoretical indefiniteness. Thus, although embeddedness purports to explain some forms of economic action better than do pure economic accounts, its implications are indeterminate because of the imbalance between the relatively specific propositions of economic theories and the broad statements about how social ties shape economic and collective action.
This work aims to develop one of perhaps multiple specifications of embeddedness, a concept that has been used to refer broadly to the contingent nature of economic action with respect to cognition, social structure, institutions, and culture. Zukin and DiMaggio (1990) classified embeddedness into four forms: structural, cognitive, political, and cultural. The last three domains of embeddedness primarily reflect social constructionist perspectives on embeddedness, whereas structural embeddedness is principally concerned with how the quality and network architecture of material exchange relationships influence economic activity. In this paper, I limit my analysis to the concept of structural embeddedness.
THE PROBLEM OF EMBEDDEDNESS AND ECONOMIC ACTION
Powell's (1990) analysis of the sociological and economic literatures on exchange suggests that transactions can take place through loose collections of individuals who maintain impersonal and constantly shifting exchange lies, as in markets, or through stable networks of exchange partners who maintain close social relationships. The key distinction between these systems is the structure and quality of exchange ties, because these factors shape expectations and opportunities.
The neoclassical formulation is often taken as the baseline theory for the study of interfirm relationships because it embodies the core principles of most economic approaches (Wilson, 1989). In the ideal-type atomistic market, exchange partners are linked by arm's-length ties. Self-interest motivates action, and actors regularly switch to, new buyers and sellers to take advantage of new entrants or avoid dependence. The exchange itself is limited to price data, which supposedly distill all the information needed to make efficient decisions, especially when there are many buyers and sellers or transactions are nonspecific. Personal relationships are cool and atomistic; if ongoing ties or implicit contracts exist between parties, it is believed to be more a matter of self-interested, profit-seeking behavior than willful commitment or altruistic attachment (Macneil, 1978). Accordingly, arm's-length ties facilitate performance because firms disperse their business among many competitors, widely sampling prices and avoiding small-numbers bargaining situations that can entrap them in inefficient relationships (Hirschman, 1970). Although some economists have recognized that the conclusion that markets are efficient becomes suspect when the idealization of theoretical cases is abandoned, they nonetheless have tended to regard the idealized model as giving a basically correct view and have paid scant attention to instances that diverge from the ideal (Krugman, 1986).
At the other end of the exchange continuum are embedded relationships, and here a well-defined theory of embeddedness and interfirm networks has yet to emerge. Instead, findings from numerous empirical studies suggest that embedded exchanges have several distinctive features. Research has shown that network relationships in the Japanese auto and Italian knitwear industries are characterized by trust and personal ties, rather than explicit contracts, and that these features make expectations more predictable and reduce monitoring costs (Dore, 1983; Asanuma, 1985; Smitka, 1991; Gerlach, 1992). Helper (1990) found that close supplier-manufacturer relationships in the auto industry are distinctive for their "thick" information exchange of tacit and proprietary know-how, while Larson (1992) and Lazerson (1995) found that successful entrepreneurial business networks are typified by coordination devices that promote knowledge transfer and learning. Romo and Schwartz's (1995) and Dore's (1983) findings concerning the embeddedness of firms in regional production networks suggest that embedded actors satisfice rather than maximize on price and shift their focus from the narrow economically rational goal of winning immediate gain and exploiting dependency to cultivating long-term, cooperative ties. The basic conjecture of this literature is that embeddedness creates economic opportunities that are difficult to replicate via markets, contracts, or vertical integration.
To a limited degree, revisionist economic frameworks have attempted to explain the above outcomes by redefining embeddedness in terms of transaction cost, agency, or game theory concepts. Like their neoclassical parent, however, these schemes do not explicitly recognize or model social structure but, rather, apply conventional economic constructs to organizational behavior, bypassing the issues central to organization theorists.(1) Transaction cost economics, for example, has usefully revised our understanding of when nonmarket transactions will arise, yet because its focus is on dyadic relations, network dynamics "are given short shrift" (Williamson, 1994: 85). Transaction cost economics also displays a bias toward describing opportunistic rather than cooperative relations in its assumption that, irrespective of the social relationship between a buyer and seller, if the transaction degenerates into a small-numbers bargaining situation, then the buyer or seller will opportunistically squeeze above-market rents or shirk, whichever is in his or her self-interest (Ghoshal and Moran, 1996).
Agency theory also focuses mainly on self-interested human nature, dyadic principal-agent ties, and the use of formal controls to explain exchange, rather than on an account of embeddedness. For example, Larson's (1992) study of interfirm exchange relationships revealed agency theory's limited ability to explain network forms of organization when she showed that there is a lack of control and monitoring devices between firms, that the roles of principal and agent blur and shift, and that incentives are jointly set. Similarly, team theory is pressed to explain interfirm exchange relations because of its assumption that group members have identical interests, an unrealistic assumption when formal rule structures (a hierarchy) do not exist or group members both cooperate and compete for resources, as in the case of manufacturer-supplier networks (Cyert and March, 1992).
Game theory can accommodate N-person, network-like structures, yet the core argument -- that selfish players will defect from cooperation when the endgame ensues even if they have had on-going social ties and like each other well (Jackson and Wolinsky, 1996) -- fits poorly with the empirical regularities of networks. Padgett and Ansell (1993: 1308) found in their network analysis of fifteenth-century Medici trading companies that "clear goals of self-interest ... are not really features of people; they are ... varying structures of games." In cases in which game theory concedes outcomes to social structure, it tends to do so after the fact, to align predictions and empirical results, but continues to ignore sociological questions on the origin of expectations, why people interpret rules similarly, or why actors cooperate when it contradicts self-interest (Kreps, 1990).
Thus, while revisionist economic schemes advance our understanding of the economic details of transacting, they faintly recognize the influence of social structure on economic life. Similarly, theory about the properties and process by which embeddedness affects economic action remains nascent in the organizations literature.

History, social structure and individualism: a cross-cultural perspective on Japan. International Journal of Comparative Sociology; 2/1/1998; Schooler, Carmi

This paper explores how history and social structure affect individualism in Japan. It integrates a variety of cross-cultural studies comparing Japan with the West whose methodological approaches vary considerably. Its historical comparisons point to many parallels between Japan and the West and reveal similar links between economic development and individualism. Sociological surveys demonstrate that similar environmental conditions, particularly environmental complexity, have similar effects in the two settings and provide evidence of a growth in individualism in Japan resulting from an increase in such complexity. Anthropological and developmental psychological studies demonstrate how maternal behaviors reproduce cultural norms about appropriate levels of group interdependence and suggest that maternal behavior is becoming more individualistic in Japan, most probably as a result of changing socio-environmental conditions. Reported findings on how the institutionalization of values such as individualism or interdependence lead to such values' continued acceptance provide an indication of why the values embodied in cultures and social structures often seem to change more slowly than do values of individuals.
This paper explores how history and social structure affect individualism in Japan. In doing so, it reports on a variety of cross-cultural studies comparing Japan with the West. Although I have been involved in most of these studies, their approaches vary markedly. They span the range from broad historical comparisons covering centuries to analyses of variance of fine-grained time samples of parent and child behavior. The disciplines involved include not only sociology, but also psychology, anthropology and history. In the course of the paper, I will use all of these different cross-cultural comparative approaches to try to gain an understanding of the differences and similarities between Japan and the West in how the place of the individual in society is viewed.
There is a school of thought that takes a quite different approach - one which maintains that the Japanese are essentially different from other people - one of the most basic differences being their fundamental rejection of individualism in favor of psychological interdependency.(1) Known as Nihonjinron, those in this school tend to see Japan as essentially incomparable to other nations except in terms of the ways it is better than they are (for a critical review see Befu, 1993). This paper, on the other hand, focuses on the many historical and modem day similarities between Japan and the West. Where it finds differences it tries to explain them according to generally applicable sociological and psychological principles rather than postulating that the Japanese are somehow inherently different.

Social structure, political institutions, and mobilization potential.
Social Forces; 12/1/1995; McVeigh, Rory
Social movement theorists in the U.S. have focused considerable attention on the question of how a collectivity, given a common interest, organizes in pursuit of a collective good. Meanwhile, their European counterparts have primarily focused on group grievances and on the way in which structural change generates new mobilization potentials, that is, on groups of individuals sharing common interests that could be potentially activated by social movement organizers (see Cohen 1985; Klandermans 1984).

Renewed interest in group grievances and interest formation can be attributed to the increasingly diverse set of issues that form the basis of both traditional and nontraditional political activity. Many contemporary movements, such as those promoting women's rights, the environment, gay rights, and pro-life and pro-choice concerns, are not strictly engaged in distributive battles, but instead are promoting values or a collective identity. The proliferation in recent decades of social movement organizations that are not engaged in distributive battles, and that therefore do not fit nearly onto a one-dimensional left-right continuum, forces social movement theorists to once again consider the origins of group grievances and interests.

In this article I explore the role of social structure in the promotion of interest distributions, which refer to how political preferences on various issues are distributed within a given community. I argue that some forms of structural differentiation within a community promote interest distributions where nonmaterial interests cannot be effectively channeled into established political institutions. The argument is tested through an analysis of party voting and voting on ballot initiatives concerning social or cultural issues in Colorado from 1980 through 1990.

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