Network Communities within Analytical Sociology One of the core issues (if not the core issue) in analytical sociology is the investigation of the micro-macro link in social phenomena (Hedström & Swedberg, 1998, Hedström, 2005). Analytical sociology endorses a social mechanism-based type of explanation according to which causal relationships between social phenomena at the macro-level are expla...

This paper examines the e¤ects of social ties on governance. Social ties are per se neutral and merely act as incentive bridges that transmit incentives between individuals. Whether such transmission of incentives improves or undermines governance depends on the particular incentives transmitted. We demonstrate this through a delegated monitoring model where the supervisor is friends with the a...

We study how the strength of social ties is related to economic choices made by pairs of individuals who share a social relationship. We draw our information about social ties from the Facebook social network which comprises billions of connections of varying strength between acquainted individuals. We employ an economic experiment using monetary incentives to examine whether trust and reciproc...

Informal social control is the communication of disapproval by one individual to another individual (the perpetrator) who has transgressed a social norm. The present research examined the conditions under which social control provokes moral versus angry emotions in the perpetrator. The roles of perceived deviance and the appraisal of the legitimacy of social control as predictors of these emoti...

As Foner (1999) explained, “Kinship ties are an effective way to cope with uncertainty and economic scarcity.” Granovetter (1973) defined the “strength” of an interpersonal tie as being a function of the “amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie.” Individuals build and cultivate both strong and weak interper...

OSS developers bring to a project more than the skills and knowledge acquired through years of experience. They bring with them the ability to acquire resources from their social networks. The skills and capabilities of the developers referred to as ‘human capital’ by economists are supplemented by the capabilities to access resources from the network referred to as ‘social capital’ by sociolog...

While direct social ties have been intensely studied in the context of computer-mediated social networks, indirect ties (e.g., friends of friends) have seen little attention. Yet in real life, we often rely on friends of our friends for recommendations (of good doctors, good schools, or good babysitters), for introduction to a new job opportunity, and for many other occasional needs. In this wo...