Abstract
Employing a variation of the Small World technique for tracing social relations in the context of a larger social structure, the instrumental uses of social relations are examined in terms of the prestige and types of relations characteristic of participants m the search process. The results show that successful chains tend to involve participants of higher occupational prestige as the chains progress before "dipping" down toward the target prestige level at the last link. Also, the successful chains tend to utilize weak and infrequent social relations rather than strong and frequent social relations.
Keywords
PrestigeSocial relationContext (archaeology)Occupational prestigeSocial psychologySocial environmentPsychologySociologyPositive economicsSocial scienceEconomicsGeographyDemography
Affiliated Institutions
Related Publications
Conflict, cooperation and trust in three power systems
The central variables of power, conflict, cooperation and trust have traditionally been employed in a context-irrelevant fashion as general theoretical explanations for many soc...
Refining the Risk Concept: Decision Context as a Factor Mediating the Relation Between Risk and Program Effectiveness
In meta-analyses of the rehabilitation literature, reoffending risk has been identified as a primary variable influencing program effectiveness. However, it is by no means clear...
A bibliometric analysis of managerial finance: a retrospective
Purpose Managerial finance (MF) started publication in 1975 and celebrated its 45th anniversary in 2019. The purpose of this study is to provide a bibliometric analysis of MF be...
Random Allocation in Observational Data
Conventional observational epidemiology has an unenviable reputation for generating false-positive findings,1,2 or "scares," as others call them.3 In 1993, for example, the New ...
Publication Info
- Year
- 1978
- Type
- article
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 149-166
- Citations
- 165
- Access
- Closed
External Links
Social Impact
Altmetric
PlumX Metrics
Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions
Citation Metrics
165
OpenAlex
5
Influential
67
CrossRef
Cite This
Nan Lin,
Paul Dayton,
Peter Greenwald
(1978).
Analyzing the Instrumental Use of Relations in the Context of Social Structure.
Sociological Methods & Research
, 7
(2)
, 149-166.
https://doi.org/10.1177/004912417800700203
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1177/004912417800700203