Social Networks and Poverty

• Low-income individuals rely on supportive social ties to cope with the effects of poverty.
• It is not well-understood how new ties are formed.
• Routine organizations like businesses, churches, and childcare centers can facilitate these ties.
• These organizations provide institutionally governed spaces for social interaction beyond their primary functions.

Organizational Brokerage

• Routine organizations can contribute to tie formation, acting as brokers.
• The success of this brokerage depends on the organization's institutional norms.
• Key norms include frequent and long-lasting interaction, focus on others, and emphasis on joint tasks.
• Networks formed in this way can foster belonging, generalized exchange, and organizational connections.

Social Networks and Poverty

• Social networks are vital for low-income populations to buffer against poverty.
• There is a common misconception that being poor automatically grants access to supportive networks.
• Many low-income individuals lack such networks.
• Research indicates that poorer individuals in high-poverty areas tend to have smaller non-kin networks and are more likely to be isolated.
• It is important to understand how these individuals form support networks.

The Role of Routine Organizations

• Many people interact with others in organizations as part of their daily lives.
• These organizations include workplaces, churches, childcare centers, schools, soup kitchens, gyms, bars, restaurants, and community centers.
• Routine organizations facilitate the formation of ties outside the family for low-income populations.
• Systematic theories about how this process works are lacking.
• Factors influencing tie formation in certain contexts and the nature of resulting relations need exploration.

Motivation for Study

• The rising importance of nonfamily support networks is a key motivation.
• Support networks are valuable across the income distribution but crucial for low-income families.
• The need for low-income families to secure resources from networks has increased.
• Cash assistance for low-income mothers has decreased due to changes in the welfare state.
• Legislation has reduced welfare rolls, making poor families more reliant on their own resources.
• Social networks, especially family ties, are important for avoiding homelessness and material hardship.
• Family networks are strained, increasing the importance of nonfamily ties.
• There's a need for clearer theories on how organizations affect urban poverty and inequality.
• Organizations play a role in how poverty affects life chances and how resources are distributed.
• Understanding the processes through which organizations operate is essential.

Policy Implications

• Clear guidance is needed for practitioners and legislators to intervene at the network level.
• Policymakers often invoke the importance of social networks for low-income families.
• They remain uncertain about how to incentivize or facilitate the building of these connections.
• Asking people to make more friends is not effective.
• Conditions resulting from structural factors may appear as inadequate networking.
• Childcare centers and community centers can be effective intervention points.
• There is a lack of models for how practitioners can intervene in local organizations.

Research Focus

• The text will address when routine organizations help form new social ties for low-income individuals.
• It will identify the mechanisms through which this happens.
• It will document the operation of these mechanisms based on case studies of organizations frequented by low-income families.
• The study builds on network theories about the importance of brokers.
• Conduits between previously unconnected actors are important.
• The process of meeting others in routine organizations results from organizational brokerage, connecting people to others.

Brokerage Theory

• Routine organizations can broker social connections through multiple mechanisms.
• These include mechanisms driven by actors and those driven by institutional practices.
• The impact on social interaction among participants is a key focus, arguing that success depends on institutional norms.
• Institutional norms should render interaction frequent, long-lasting, focused on others, and centered on joint tasks.
• The resulting networks may differ from other supportive ties.
• There are still unanswered questions that need to be addressed.

Examining Tie Formation

• Literature on how actors form ties is vast and diverse.
• The individual is typically the unit of analysis.
• Tie formation results from two processes: "meeting" and "mating" (contact and deciding to associate).
• The meeting process involves examining factors that affect opportunities for social interaction.
• Rates of social association depend on opportunities for social contact.
• Organizations and other "foci" bring unconnected people into contact.
• The decision to form a tie involves examining factors affecting individual preference for associates of particular kinds.

Limitations of Current Perspectives

• Limited when applied to the current context.
• Factors affecting whether someone patronizes a barbershop (chance to meet) and the decision to associate (choosing to mate) are not separate processes.
• Problem: assumes that once contact is made, it's up to the individuals.
• For example, many people go to barbershops and connect with no one.
• Attribute outcome to low self-efficacy, extraversion, motivation, friendliness, inclination to make friends can be implausible.
• Equally motivated people can patronize different barbershops and differ in interaction rates.
• Different childcare centers foster different amounts of interactions from equally motivated parents.

The importance of Organizations

• Conditions of the organization can impact the degree of network formation among people coming into contact.
• Post-meeting process depends only on individual decisions is an undersocialized understanding of human actors.
• The distinction between contact and choice elides the mediating roles organizations play in supporting ties.
• Organizations shape the post-contact process, agency matters, and some people are more efficacious than others.
• Even among such actors, organizations can make the process easier or more difficult.
• Mediation comes from brokerage theory and the understanding that a mediator is a broker.

Brokerage concepts

• Broker is traditionally defined as the link between two unconnected actors.
• Brokerage is the process of connecting actors in systems of social, economic, or political relations to give access to resources.
• Brokers as tertius gaudens, people who gain advantage.
• Instead, we explore brokers tertius lungs: people who bring people together due to location
• Brokerage: process, organizational, multifaceted.

Brokerage as a Process

• Brokerage is a process; research on network analysis is focused on their opportunity to connect others.
• Brokerage is not structure but a process because Brokers must connect people, and the things they do are important.
• Focusing on structural conditions can miss the things a broker does to connect unconnected people; in contrast, potential broker fails to do, missing opportunity.
• Brokerage theory must account for "social behavior of brokering"

Brokerage: Organizationally Affected

• Brokerage is affected not only by persons but by orgs.

• A routine org. is a space of interaction, institutional norms, and understandings.

• Actors orient activities/practices toward a global purpose.

• Orgs vary in many conditions; scope, mission, profit status, funding source, orientation.

  Organizations operate

  • Orgs can operate as brokers
  • Differs from res: undestanding of orgs role as brokers
  • 2 ways: conceive org to be an actor (behavior analogous to individual); org might gain from brokerage to set prices; org individual. Are 2 instances of same class and analogous class occurs
  • Conceived organization: community (entity comprising members (groups, parties associations or even indentity); effect broker performance based on whether member is a representative. Christian-community vis-a-vis non Christians, organization are analogous 2 community
  • Contrast-org neither individual nor community. Routine range widely of type orientation

Organizational Effect

• All contribute space interaction, not individuals and kinds of communities thus brokerage is distinct 2 organizations
• organizational brokerage may not come through but through multiple types of mechanisms. Organization: set of actors, space/constellation shape by norms and understandings.
• Developing conceptual model for shaping networks is multiple processes: individual enters space, interacts with actors and responds to needs and understandings to meet others to prove useful

Actor-Driven Brokerage

• Systemize processes is 2 focus entity doing brokerage: person and process
• Application of brokerage process requires interactions: individual w/ acquaintance organizations-may others like tertiary lungs
• Traditional brokerage. Driven by actors

Actor-driven brokerage can take at least two different forms

• Based on whether Broker is connecting indivual 2 another
• A church pastor connects parisherner 2 pastor @ sister Church, or to another church-type C.
• Both documented: urban contexts. Made those connections between different centers even waiting areas.
• Research: shows that unconnected actors in same organization (type C)- schools (evident in schools). One parent is prez if PTA that often fosters Relations bt pts and bt pts nd staff
• Process: just brokerage, that it happens by absence of org (scott didn't meet Pito)

Institution-Driven Brokerage

• Driving not only by actors but by org itself.
  • org. structures formation if ties btws members large # of ways (rule membership, physical layout) and institutional norms of social interaction
• institutional practices: via formal or informal that ensure/discourage behavior, in cognitive sense via understandings

Institution may

• A-through meeting members in different contexts, healthcare-families in neighborhood
• E-rules encourage interaction others,

Institutional facts:

• No indivual actual brokerage Researchers documented meetings org.
• Those circumstances institutional practices essential, key in type d been reported
• That church is not where people worship-instead interactives places, vertical/horizontal helping connections within and between churches
• Bulk discussion process: Examing institutional norms
• Repeared interaction: Foundational (Homans, LAZ/mart)
• Interactions led by others (homophily)
• Organizations shape support network for income families

Research by churches documented

• Ellison relationships between church participation/ network size- respond several times found non skin ties compare never attendance
• Taylor- mixed class community that people made through rehearsals
• Daily requirements (childcare) make multiple opportunities where individuals interact.
• Practices: such contact times-meetings with teachers facilities interaction tie to family relationship. Researcher documented formation ties support-communication

Communities have documented too

• Given centers supports- requirement participants
• Child attendant at school
• Become close -other attendees
• Research shows that hair salons/beauty is due to interactions in them.

Second factor: duration

• Duration is a role in brokerage and there is a presence of norms
• Time contributes social conversation no other intention
• Process through which Friends becomes acquaintances,acquaintances friends
• Bars, pubs, places which individuals socialize
• Duneiers: shows commnities can form patronize and eat to support eachother
• Over months Valois table passed playing rhythm

Third Factor

• focus- important papers forms ties-interaction focus in group interactions: Understand may encourage less/ More.
• Extent to which given members (outward)

Organizational focus cont.

• The first is the extent to which any given member is oriented
• Towards Others: Helps tie formation because it encourages interacrion+identify common values
• Faciilatites -discovery

Joint Tasks

• The second way focus
• The extent to which members -Positive effect trust -lawer
• People represent themselves -Small: To standards-meet
• Low Income has uncovered -Centers expect

What Resources Tie provides

• Individual form ties in organizagition

• Setting lack: true relations

• Ties are useful ways +organization

• emotional support

• Information

• Klinbenher: documents/research

• Center gives bridge (437)

• Small 2009: ties depression

• Center - relations (interviews and focus groups) Support (exchange + info)

Conclusion

• Developed perspective +tie how organizations brokerage and those mechanisms secured
• That prospective understandable document ties Low inc families
• Successful depends-institutional standard
• Networks +ways