Networks in the Global Village (Barry Wellman)

Society has undergone a lot of changes in the past centuries. The manifestations of community have changed, and certain types of community have become more prevalent than others. While many fear that community has been lost in the midst of urbanization, greater state control, and other contemporary factors, others maintain that community has not been lost, but changed. In his book, Networks in the Global Village, Wellman seeks to unravel the mystery of community in contemporary society, from the perspective of interpersonal ties, and focuses particularly what he calls the Community Question. This question is two-sided, examining the relationship between large social systems and personal community networks or interpersonal ties. How does the structure of large-scale social systems affect the composition, structure and contents of interpersonal ties within them? And how does the nature of community networks affect the nature of the large-scale social systems in which they are embedded?

An essential step in the process of determining the effects that Wellman is after is establishing what constitutes a community; what measurable characteristics of community differentiate one type of community from another. Ferdinand Tönnies defined two types of communities in 1887, claiming that society had shifted from being a Gemeinschaft to a Gesellschaft. The former is a society organized communally, characteristic of rural areas and underdeveloped societies, where densely interconnected social relationships are composed principally of neighbors and kin. The latter is a contractually organized society, characteristic of industrial cities, where sparsely knit relationships are composed principally of ties between friends and acquaintances. Tönnies believed that Gesellschaft societies were leading to specialized, contractual exchanges replacing communally enforced norms of mutual support.

Social scientists have found different reasons for change in community, including the increased scale of the nation-state’s activities, increasing globalization creating uncertainty in local communities, the development of narrowly instrumental bureaucratic institutions replacing the broadly supportive community ties with contractually defined narrow relations of exchange, the diversity of persons with whom urbanites can come into contact, and the proliferation of widespread networks of cheap and efficient transportation. These and other factors have resulted in the decline of Gemeinschaft communities and the loss of locally based social networks. While many academics have been able to point to such a “loss of community” illustrated by Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, Wellman maintains that such pessimistic claims about community disintegration are less a result of true community loss and more a result of the definitions that they have given for “community.” By shifting the study of community from a community equals neighborhood perspective (i.e. geographically bounded social network), to a community equals intimate ties perspective (i.e. not geographically bounded), Wellman finds that such changes have neither smashed nor withered community ties. In fact, communities are alive and well; they simply take on a different form as structural changes impose restrictions on the traditional Gemeinschaft relational patterns. Wellman advocates studying communities from a non-territorial perspective, saying that spatial distributions are not inherently important variables to sociologists; they assume importance only as they affect the formation, composition and structure of interpersonal networks, the flow of resources through such networks, and the interplay of such community networks with the division of labor and the organization of power within larger scale social systems.

Wellman uses social network analysis to study communities. Doing this allows him to be freed of the preoccupation with solidarity and neighborhood that fills other community analysis. Using this strategy, he is able to avoid the assumptions that people necessarily interact in neighborhoods, kinship groups or other bounded solidarities. He is also able to study linkages at all scales, ranging from interpersonal relations to world systems. The methodology he uses to study social networks is based on studying personal communities as opposed to whole networks. The latter method describes the comprehensive structure of role relationships in a complete population, and allows analysts to have a simultaneous view of the social system as a whole and of the parts that make up the system. The former method, chosen by Wellman, defines a network from the standpoint of focal persons, a sample of individuals at the centers of their own networks. By looking at how one person relates to and depends on his or her personal ties, and doing the same procedure over and over again with many different focal persons in a population, you can gain an understanding of how the network works without having to make a comprehensive relational map of every individual in that population.

While the bulk of Wellman’s book consists of studies of personal communities in different parts of the world among different types of societies, he spends some time at the beginning of his book pointing out general trends in community networks today. The first major trend is that many contemporary community ties are narrow, specialized relationships, not broadly supportive ties. This means that most of the ties that a person has provide only a few kinds of social support, as opposed to a broad range of social support characteristic of tight-knit rural communities in the past. The second trend is that people are not wrapped up in traditional densely knit, tightly bounded communities, but are rather maneuvering in sparsely knit, loosely bounded, frequently changing networks. This means that few people have stable, geographically bounded community networks on which they can depend for social support; instead they must actively search and manipulate their separate ties, one by one, to deal with their affairs. The third trend is that communities have moved out of neighborhoods to be dispersed networks that continue to be supportive and sociable. It is important to note that even though these communities may be less location-bounded than in the past, they still provide support and socialization. The fourth trend is that private intimacy has replaced public sociability. This means that rather than operating out of public neighborhood spaces, contemporary communities usually operate out of private homes. The fifth trend is that communities have become domesticated and feminized. This means that where once public communities had been men’s worlds, now home-based community networks bring husbands and wives together, the home has become less of a private space, and women have taken on a bigger role in assisting their husbands in maintaining community ties.

Wellman builds a foundation on which to study the diversity of personal communities throughout the world. He defines the elements of personal communities. Adding onto Elizabeth Bott’s network topology (network size, kin percentage, multiplexity, density, heterogeneity), he defines a topology for personal communities that includes network size, tie strength, percentage of the network made of up by kin, percentage of the network made up by neighbors, percentage of the network made up by friends, muliplexity, percentage of the network made up of voluntary ties, network density, face-to-face contact, phone contact, heterogeneity, group contact and social support. While he doesn’t include every single one of those variables in the studies he and his co-authors conduct throughout the world, he uses the elements that are necessary to answer the question at hand for each study. He also defines four abstract building blocks that can be used to describe different community types, depending on whether there is a lot or a little of that factor present in the community. The building blocks are Range, Intimacy, Contact, and Immediate Kin/Friendship. Range refers to the level of heterogeneity, intimacy refers to the level intimacy or strength of the tie, contact refers to the frequency of interaction, and immediate kin/friendship refers to whether or not the tie is immediate kin or extended kin or friendship. An example of how to use these elements to describe a community would be defining Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft communities in these terms. A Gemeinschaft community is predominantly composed of kin, in frequent contact, with little range but much intimacy. By contrast, a Gesellschaft community is predominantly composed of friends (instead of kin) with little contact or intimacy, but with much range.

Having this foundation on which to base studies of personal communities, Wellman, along with other social scientists who co-authored his book, sets out to look at eight communities throughout the world to answer the aforementioned Community Question. He looks at a middle-class community in Toronto, Canada; a predominantly black community and a predominantly white community in Nashville, Tennessee; a poor community in Santiago, Chile; a community in France; a communist and then post-communist community in Hungary; a community in China; a community in Japan; a community in Hong Kong; and finally, he theorizes about online personal communities on the Internet.

The first chapter, Wellman and Gulia’s chapter on Toronto, focuses on social support in community networks. Who is providing what kind of social support to the focal persons interviewed in Toronto? They discover that people tend to receive different kinds of social support through different types of relationships. They also find that large, heterogeneous networks have greater numbers of members who provide all kinds of support; indicating that the greater the range of the network, the greater the number of people is who can provide companionship, minor services, major services and emotional support. Another finding is that the greater the availability (i.e more contact) of intimate networks, the greater supportiveness these networks provide. This is not the case for less-intimate networks, where supportiveness is not positively correlated with availability. Their study also shows that kin density is not an important factor in the provision of support, in fact, kinship ties may be retained even if they are unsupportive, burdensome and provide poor companionship, because of the normative pressure to maintain them. Finally, this study conducted in Toronto shows that there is no relationship between a network’s socioeconomic level and its supportiveness.

A look into Nashville, Tennessee shows that there are differences of community even among ethnic groups living in the same city. Lee and Campbell’s study among Black and White Americans in Nashville was aimed at trying to find out what differences there are among these two communities and what could explain these differences. The results confirmed a theory called Compression Theory that predicts that black city-dwellers should be more involved with neighbors than whites, because historical factors such as discrimination in housing, employment, education and other institutions have “compressed” black networks territorially as well as racially. Limited access to resources and transportation outside the local community make it hard to maintain long-distance relationships, forcing neighborhood to rely more on themselves. This theory predicts that necessity, rather than choice, explains blacks’ greater reliance on neighbors for fellowship, information and support. They find more support for compression theory than for other theories, and confirm that within urban neighborhoods, community for African-Americans appears to be more intense and spatially concentrated than for whites. Though they never specifically say this, it is clear that inner-city black neighborhoods are more of a Gemeinschaft and inner-city white neighborhoods are more of a Gesellschaft.

Vicente Espinoza wrote Wellman’s fourth chapter, which focuses on social networks among the urban poor in Chile. The focus of this study is to find out the makeup of these personal networks, and to find out what kinds of support these personal networks offer the focal person. The makeup of these communities is different than more affluent Western communities of the North – the neighborhoods of the Latin American poor are worlds of strong ties whose basic units of integration are nuclear families strongly related to each other. Beyond the basic unit – the nuclear family – these households relate to each other on the basis of social context, not kinship. They are strong, territorially bounded ties characteristic of a Gemeinschaft, though Espinoza doesn’t call it that. These personal networks function as tremendous economic resources. Where a North-American family would likely go to the Market or the Government for certain services, such as child-care, food and clothing, watching the house, getting house upgrades, finding jobs, getting credit or emergency cash; the Chilean poor depend almost entirely on their social network for these. These low-range, high-contact, high-intimacy and high-immediate kin networks are the safety net that keep these families alive.

Ferrand, Mounier and Degenne look into the structure of social relations in France. They define four kinds of ties: friendship, love, confidants, and mutual aid. They use these to examine the composition of the French social structure, surveying thousands of households all over the country. They discover that mutual aid is generally given by kinship and neighbors, while friends and workmates tend to function as confidants. They also discover that most sexual relationships (a semi-adequate indicator for the love tie) happen among friends and workmates (or schoolmates), and happen much less frequently among neighbors and never among kin. In terms of friendship ties, the French are more likely to have friendship ties with workmates and schoolmates than with kin and neighbors, though both of the latter increase in importance with age. Another factor they look into is the homophilaity of ties. They find that friendship ties are the most homophilous, while mutual aid relations are the most heterophilous. This is consistent with Granovetter’s “strength of weak ties” theory.

Wellman spends some time in the next few chapters focusing on the Eastern World. His sixth chapter focuses on personal networks taking on the role of capital in communist and post-communist Hungary. The idea that personal networks function as economic capital is not new – we found that out from the chapter on Chile. What is new in this chapter is the claim that communist societies depend more on personal networks than capitalist societies, and that post-communist societies depend even more on personal networks than communist societies. The argument is that because the institutional framework of communist societies is incapable of providing for the needs of people, the only way to cope and survive in a communist society is to make use of personal networks. Whereas the Chilean poor had no money to pay for services in the market that their personal networks ended up providing, the communist societies have no market to buy from, let alone money to pay for it, and the government can’t provide the services either, so both societies, largely for the same reasons, rely heavily on personal ties to make due and find new opportunities. The study done by Sik and Wellman finds that the majority of households supply all kinds of support to neighboring households; from repairs to lending tools to finding jobs to giving advice. And though the numbers are slightly lower, a large percentage of households are in a symmetric support relationship with other households (in other words, they trade favors symmetrically with each other). They also find that such reciprocal relationships and transactions are commonplace both horizontally and hierarchically, so you are just as likely to find neighbors helping each other out as you are to find a manager helping someone below him in exchange for a favor (or a bribe). As to their argument about personal networks playing an even more important role in post-communist societies, they say that since things are constantly changing, new regulations and laws, and since capitalism is a relatively foreign concept to many people in these societies, they rely heavily on people with know-how, most likely friends of friends (weak ties), to get anything done. In a post-communist society, knowledge of the new system is highly advantageous, and personal networks are the most effective way to gain access to that knowledge.

In Wellman’s seventh chapter, Yanjie Bian proposes an alternative to Granovetter’s “strength of weak ties” finding. This study shows that in highly authoritarian regimes, where making use of one’s personal networks is highly illegal and potentially lethal, people are forced to rely on their strong ties for finding a job. Though nepotism and taking advantage of one’s position to help another person in one’s personal network are commonplace in China, because the risk of suffering severe consequences if caught doing such a thing is so high, Granovetter’s theory doesn’t apply. One can only approach someone for a favor if one is certain that the person one is asking the favor of will not turn on you. This results in a highly orchestrated mechanism of using personal networks as economic resources, relying almost entirely on strong ties. This study shows that the intimacy levels between the job seeker and the job giver are necessarily high, otherwise both would be at risk. In addition, if there is an intermediate between the job seeker and the job giver, the intimacy levels between the intermediate and the other two must also be high. This means that the “strength of strong ties” is an essential component to personal communities in China.

Shinsuke Otane writes Wellman’s eighth chapter – a comparative study between the US and Japan. The study reveals that Japanese name fewer kin as intimates than do North Americans because the pattern of parent/child cohabitation based on traditional kinship structures continues in contemporary Japan. It is also found that Japanese women tend to be more involved than men with kin and neighbors and less involved with coworkers and friends. Otane also finds that Japanese urbanites posses the far-flung, sparely knit ties that are more in tune with the Gesellschaft community. The overall conclusion of this study is that Japan is retaining its traditional structures embedded in the culture while individualism is simultaneously growing in the Japanese urbanized society.

A final study on an Eastern community is presented in Wellman’s ninth chapter, where Salaff, Fong and Siu-lun write about personal networks playing a role in migration out of Hong Kong. The study finds that the lower class in Hong Kong relies heavily on strong ties (particularly kin) in order to migrate to another country. Because they have little money, and would likely spend all of it trying to get to the country they are migrating to, they need someone to take them under their wing when they arrive in the destination country. This requires a strong tie, because very few weak ties are likely to help a person learn the language, get off the ground, find a job, etc. In stark contrast to the lower-class, however, the middle-class and semi-professionals and affluent class of Hong Kong have a strong distaste for leveraging strong ties in the country they are migrating to. They don’t want to come across as dependent or in need of any help, so they only migrate to a country when a weak tie (usually a job offer from a company) invites them to come. They will only interact with their strong ties once they have made it there on their own. Hence, the usefulness of personal communities in this case depends heavily on what socio-economic level the migrants-to-be belong to.

The last chapter of Wellman’s book is a largely theoretical approach (as opposed to survey-based, as in most of his previous chapters) to online communities. He sets up a framework for examining online communities in the future, posing the questions that need to be asked, without answering them fully himself, but rather recommending that they be studied further in the future. He concludes that online personal communities are most likely specialized relationships, rather than broadly based, organized around shared interests, rather than shard place. He argues that online communities are much more supportive than people might think them to be, and are in a way a continuation of community practices before the Internet without the barrier of distance. There are obvious differences with face-to-face communities; people are more willing to communicate with strangers online, mainly because the exit-barriers are so low, and online communities tend to be more heterogeneous than face-to-face communities. He argues that basic structures of live communities, such as norms of reciprocity, will slowly find their way into online communities, making them just as structured as face-to-face communities. He also argues that strong ties are possible online, both in cases where the relationship is entirely online, and in cases where there is both online and offline contact. The net can increase diversity; it encourages the expansion of community networks, and facilitates the interaction of one individual with many different specialized groups. In general, online communities are a medium that will serve as an infrastructure for relationships and personal communities to interact in whatever ways were characteristic of the face-to-face interactions and possibly more ways as well.

Wellman’s book does a great job of unraveling the mystery of contemporary community. His methodology of studying personal communities proved very successful, and really hones in on the main differences between communities around the world. His network topology, and his building blocks of community – range, intimacy, contact, immediate kin/friendship, are very useful tools for understanding the ways in which two communities differ. The studies conducted were a good mix of Western and Eastern countries, and provided a wide range of aspects of community to look at. Through them, he is able to answer the Community Question. Not only does Wellman show that there are differences among communities throughout the world, but that those differences rely pretty heavily on the large-scale social system. We see that in Western middle-class societies, and in upper-class Hong Kong society, weak ties play the biggest role in finding a job – consistent with Granovetter’s theory. But we also see that in China, where a totalitarian regime prevents people from openly leveraging their ties, strong ties play the biggest role in finding a job. We see that Americans tend to be more intimate with their families than Japanese – differences imposed by culture. This impact of culture and politics on the behavior of personal networks is a very valuable finding.
Though it’s not necessarily counter-intuitive or new, it is nice to have a framework for studying social networks and evidence from in-depth studies that help identify community within different social infrastructures that change with time and location. This makes Wellman’s book worth reading.