I’m working on a paper looking at labor markets, social networks, and Hayekian knowledge problems this summer. My focus is on the role of race, but now I’m thinking that class plays a bigger role than I expected. As with much of my epiphanies, it starts with Weber.
Weber broke down social relationships into two broad categories: communal and associative. “A social relationship will be called ‘communal’ if and so far as the orientation of social action – whether in the individual case, on the average, or in the pure type – is based on a subjective feeling of the parties, whether affectual or traditional, that they belong together.” argued Weber while “A social relationship will be called ‘associative’ if and insofar as the orientation of social action within it rests on a rationally motivated adjustment of interests or a similarly motivated agreement, whether the basis of rational judgment be absolute values or reasons of expediency.” There is a class element unrecognized by Weber where we see communal relationships much more common among working class individuals while associative relationships among middle and upper class individuals.
Conducting a series of in depth interviews on friendship, for example, Karen Walker (1996) found that working class friendships originated in the neighborhood and take place within the social context of the local bar, a neighborhood street, or the park playground. I would characterize these relationships as communal as they originate from a physical community. Middle class friendships, on the other hand, were made in college, graduate school, work, or through extracurricular activities and friends rarely come from the same neighborhood. I would characterize these relationships as associative since they originate in organizations with a common purpose.
Granovetter (1974), Burt (1992), Saxenien (1996), and most other major network studies focus on middle class and professional networks. This can be useful in some respects. For example, one study by Peterson, Saporta, and Seidal (2000) examined over 35,000 applicants over a ten year period at a midsized high-tech firm and found that all racial disparities in each stage of the hiring process disappeared once referral methods were taken into account. In these cases though, most of the individuals network with the purpose of making jobs contacts in mind. The primary raison d’être of these contacts is what Weber characterized as economic or at least economically oriented. They became friends because they both went to law school or because they both worked for a biotechnology firm at some point.
Unlike these associative relationships, working class networks tend not to be economic or even economically oriented. They became friends because they grew up in the same neighborhood or because their kids play baseball together, but there are still unintended economic consequences. So while it seems proper to talk about the “optimal strategy” in professional networks, this seems wholly unrealistic for working class networks.
My question is: How do I connect this back to race? You can argue that economic inequality puts more blacks in the working class category, but I still think there’s something more there. Any thoughts?
- Josh McCabe
The obvious insight here seems to be the self-perpetuation of the social circles. If your baseline (and you can pick a year, decade or century that may form the baseline, based on when a city formed or a social change occurred) population of “working class neighborhood” is racially skewed, and your baseline career and education sample is also racially skewed, then the phenomenon that you point to would perpetuate this trend.
The initial cause may be completely outside of this social networking, but even if that initial cause no longer exists, the social networking effect perpetuates the racial divide. Right?
The distinction between associative and communal modes of friendship seems a bit imprecise. You are mixing the reason for meeting (middle-class=chosen affiliation vs. working class=thrown together) with the reason for forming a friendship.
It is quite possible for those who meet associatively to bond communally–I just resonate personally with you and your values and so on–and for those who meet communally to bond associatively–of all the people in the bar I choose to hang out with you because you have an in with the local hiring hall.
The sociological issue of race is closer to the one of the nation than to the issue of class: a binding social relation, founded on a common imaginary. Hence (by the way) the regular (though not systematic) association of questions of race and questions of nation. As for Weber “communal” is not a necessary equivalent to “class” and was in fact a counter-argument against class-based reasoning of Marxists.
Making associational connections is not natural, but is a learned culture. I have noticed that when I take students to meet with leaders in any field, the middle class kids – especially the prep school kids – note who they are talking to and look for some basis of connection. To the working class students, though, the leaders were just examples of a category – “elites” or “suits” or the like – that had nothing to do with them. Even if the working class kid wanted to make a career in the leader’s field, it didn’t occur to them to make a personal connection. What middle class students see as ordinary networking, working class students view as insincere and inauthentic pretending to be friends for a non-friend (associational) benefit
I agree with srp.
Maybe if you prove that upper class relationships tend be relatively more “racially mixed” than working class ones (or vice-versa), you could get an idea if, at work, people tend to network more.
That requires an assumption that people, in their communal relationships, tend to mingle less with other races because of the feeling that they don’t “belong together”. as Weber could say.
@liberty: That’s where I’m looking now, but I still need to figure out under which conditions it perpetuates and under which conditions it might actually close the gap (something like a racial Kirznerian entrepreneur closing “structural holes.”)
@srp: But I’m thinking that who you come in contact with in the first place limits who you actually develop a relationship with (for whatever reason).
Thierry: I would agree that it is not equivalent with class in the Marxian sense, but they overlap a lot for different reasons.
I agree that the set of folks you meet limits the possibilities of whom you can become friends with. I do not agree that conditional on the pool, middle-class people behave very differently from working-class people in forming relationships–or at least I would want to see some strong evidence to change my mind.
If you think of a two-stage process where 1) first you choose a pool and 2) you link up within that pool, you could argue that a forward-looking agent would try to find a pool where the chances of finding congenial others was high. Sort of like going to soccer camp instead of general camp if you think it’s easier to make friends with soccer players than random peers. You could further argue that middle-class people either have more forethought in this behavior or have more resources to search out better pools, but I’m not sure if that could be done without a circular definition of middle-class-ness.
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