My Research
I study network dynamics in political, economic, and organizational contexts. Most broadly, my research focuses on how interdependent actors collectively shape social structure. I am especially interested in how networks shape—and are shaped by—social expectations, norms, and attitudes. I work with data from historical sources, surveys, and the web using a combination of network analysis, statistical modeling, and computational methods. While addressing diverse empirical and theoretical puzzles, my research features a core focus on the mechanisms giving rise to intergroup cooperation and conflict, political and attitudinal alignments, and economic organization.
My work has been published in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Networks, and several other outlets. My research has also received awards from the American Sociological Association's sections on Economic Sociology, Mathematical Sociology, and Rationality and Society, as well as the Academy of Management's division on Organization and Management Theory.
Papers
To Racketeer Among Neighbors: Spatial Features of Criminal Collaboration in the American Mafia
Co-authored with Clio Andris, Brittany N. Freelin, Xi Zhu, Bradley Hinger, and Hanzhou Chen
International Journal of Geographical Information Science (2021)
ABSTRACT - The American Mafia is a network of criminals engaged in drug trafficking, violence, and other illegal activities. Here, we analyze a historical spatial social network (SSN) of 680 Mafia members found in a 1960 investigatory dossier compiled by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The dossier includes connections between members who were “known criminal associates” and members are geolocated to a known home address across 15 major U.S. cities. Under an overarching narrative of identifying the network’s proclivities toward security (dispersion) or efficiency (ease of coordination), we pose four research questions related to criminal organizations, power, and coordination strategies. We find that the Mafia network is distributed as a portfolio of nearby and distant ties with significant spatial clustering among the Mafia family units. The methods used here differ from former methods that analyze the point pattern locations of individuals and the social network of individuals separately. The research techniques used here contribute to the body of non-planar network analysis methods in GIScience and can be generalized to other types of spatially-embedded social networks.
Pluralistic Collapse: The “Oil Spill” Model of Mass Opinion Polarization
American Sociological Review (2020)
Replication Data and Code
ABSTRACT - Despite widespread feeling that public opinion in the United States has become dramatically polarized along political lines, empirical support for such a pattern is surprisingly elusive. Reporting little evidence of mass polarization, previous studies assume polarization is evidenced via the amplification of existing political alignments. This article considers a different pathway: polarization occurring via social, cultural, and political alignments coming to encompass an increasingly diverse array of opinions and attitudes. The study uses 44 years of data from the General Social Survey representing opinions and attitudes across a wide array of domains as elements in an evolving belief network. Analyses of this network produce evidence that mass polarization has increased via a process of belief consolidation, entailing the collapse of previously cross-cutting alignments, thus creating increasingly broad and encompassing clusters organized around cohesive packages of beliefs. Further, the increasing salience of political ideology and partisanship only partly explains this trend. The structure of U.S. opinion has shifted in ways suggesting troubling implications for proponents of political and social pluralism.
ABSTRACT - The authors use the timing of a change in Twitter’s rules regarding abusive content to test the effectiveness of organizational policies aimed at stemming online harassment. Institutionalist theories of social control suggest that such interventions can be efficacious if they are perceived as legitimate, whereas theories of psychological reactance suggest that users may instead ratchet up aggressive behavior in response to the sanctioning authority. In a sample of 3.6 million tweets spanning one month before and one month after Twitter’s policy change, the authors find evidence of a modest positive shift in the average sentiment of tweets with slurs targeting women and/or African Americans. The authors further illustrate this trend by tracking the network spread of specific tweets and individual users. Retweeted messages are more negative than those not forwarded. These patterns suggest that organizational “anti-abuse” policies can play a role in stemming hateful speech on social media without inflaming further abuse.
Emergence of Diverse and Specialized Knowledge in a Metropolitan Tech Cluster
Co-authored with Victor Nee
Social Science Research (2020)
ABSTRACT - Specialized knowledge is increasingly central in modern information- and technology-oriented economies, yet we know surprisingly little about how this knowledge is organized. We trace the evolution of specialized knowledge at both the individual- and network-levels by analyzing email exchanges shared among members of a large tech professional community in New York City over seven years. We find a shift over time toward the emergence of an increasingly specialized ecology of knowledge and information. This division of knowledge is driven by the influx of new cohorts of participants with different knowledge and interests than those already there. Yet, even as individual contributors increasingly sort into specialized niches, the community as a whole remains robust in its ability to address topics of diverse concern. This study illustrates how new sources of data enable us to see with greater clarity the structures underpinning modern knowledge-based innovation clusters.
ABSTRACT - Does acquaintanceship with gays and lesbians produce more accepting attitudes toward homosexuality and gay rights? While most scholars and laypeople would likely answer in the affirmative, previous work struggles to answer this question due to the difficulty in disentangling social influence from social selection. Using panel data from the 2006-2010 editions of the General Social Survey, this paper provides a conservative test of the contact hypothesis for gay acceptance. People who had at least one gay or lesbian acquaintance at baseline exhibited larger attitude changes at two- and four-year follow-ups with regard to support for same-sex marriage and moral acceptance of homosexuality. Furthermore, this contact effect extended even - and perhaps especially - to people who otherwise displayed more negative prior attitudes and lower propensities for gay and lesbian acquaintanceship.
The Entrepreneur's Network and Firm Performance
Co-authored with Victor Nee and Lisha Liu
Sociological Science (2017)
ABSTRACT - Diverse organizational forms coexist in China’s market economy, adapting and evolving in intensely competitive production markets. We examine the networks of founding chief executive officers of private manufacturing firms in seven cities of the Yangzi River Delta region in China. Through sequence analysis of ties that entrepreneurs relied on for help in the founding and critical events of their businesses, we identify three discrete forms of network governance: traditional kin-based, hybrid nonkin, and rational capitalist. We find that in traditional kin-based network governance, structural holes are linked to higher returns on assets and returns on equity. By contrast, in the rational capitalist form, structural holes and higher firm performance are not linked. We thus show that the content of the tie matters critically in the relationship between structural holes and firm performance.
Network Closure and Integration in the Mid-20th Century American Mafia
Social Networks (2017)
ABSTRACT - Criminal networks are thought to be biased toward decentralization and security rather than integration and efficiency. This article examines this tradeoff in a large-scale national criminal network spanning more than 700 members of 24 distinct American mafia families operating in the mid-20th century. Producing a novel network image of the American mafia as a set of highly differentiated yet intertwined islands of criminal activity, the analysis uncovers a small-world structure that allowed both for strong intragroup closure and high intergroup connectivity. This balance reflected a division of network labor in which integrative bridging connections were disproportionately concentrated among a small number of criminals. Furthermore, the criminals who held such bridging ties tended to be either low- or high-status - but not of middling status - within their respective organizations.
Endogenous Dynamics of Institutional Change
Co-authored with Victor Nee and Sonja Opper
Rationality and Society (2017)
[Lead article in special issue with commentaries from R. Solow, M. Ruef, A. Van de Rijt, C. Cameron and M. Macy, P. DiMaggio, and R. Calvert]
ABSTRACT - A parsimonious set of mechanisms explains how and under which conditions behavioral deviations build into cascades that reshape institutional frameworks from the bottom up, even if institutional innovations initially conflict with the legally codified rules of the game. Specifically, we argue that this type of endogenous institutional change emerges from an interplay between three factors: the utility gain agents associate with decoupling from institutional equilibria, positive externalities derived from similar decoupling among one's neighbors, and accommodation by state actors. Where endogenous institutional change driven by societal action is sufficiently robust, it can induce political actors to accommodate and eventually to legitimize institutional innovations from below. We provide empirical illustrations of our theory in two disparate institutional contexts - the rise of private manufacturing in the Yangzi delta region of China since 1978, focusing on two municipalities in that region, and the diffusion of gay bars in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s. We validate our theory with an agent-based simulation.
Why Do Liberals Drink Lattes?
Co-authored with Yongren Shi and Michael Macy
American Journal of Sociology (2015)
Our summary for USAPP blog
ABSTRACT - Popular accounts of "lifestyle politics" and "culture wars" suggest that political and ideological divisions extend also to leisure activities, consumption, aesthetic taste, and personal morality. Drawing on a total of 22,572 pairwise correlations from the General Social Survey (1972-2010), the authors provide comprehensive empirical support for the anecdotal accounts. Moreover, most ideological differences in lifestyle cannot be explained by demographic covariates alone. The authors propose a surprisingly simple solution to the puzzle of lifestyle politics. Computational experiments show how the self-reinforcing dynamics of homophily and influence dramatically amplify even very small elective affinities between lifestyle and ideology, producing a stereotypical world of "latte liberals" and "bird-hunting conservatives" much like the one in which we live.
The Heterogeneous Economic Returns to Military Service: Evidence from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (2013)
ABSTRACT - This article documents heterogeneous economic returns to military service that vary with the individual propensity to serve, even within a relatively privileged sample of mostly white high school graduates. Using a rich set of covariates from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, I estimate propensity scores for male respondents' likelihood of voluntary military enlistment or involuntary draft conscription. Then, I use recently developed HLM-based methods for causal inference to analyze systematic variation in veteran status' effect on later earnings as a function of these propensity scores. Among individuals with low propensities for military service, but not among others, veterans suffer large wage penalties. While this pattern applies to both voluntary enlisters and draftees, the timing of the wage penalty differs by mode of military entry. These effects are shown to correlate strongly with differences in educational attainment between veterans and nonveterans with low propensities for military service, suggesting the greater value of opportunities for human capital accumulation in the civilian sphere.
ABSTRACT - Research on contemporary European politics has shown that immigrant population size is strongly associated with vote totals for anti-immigrant political parties. Competitive threat theories suggest that this association should be positive, whereas intergroup contact theories imply that it should be negative. A two-level analysis of vote totals for the French Front National (FRN) suggests that the direction of this association depends critically on the level of analysis. At the department (i.e., state or regional) level, large immigrant populations are associated with higher FRN vote totals. At the commune (i.e., town or city) level, however, large immigrant populations are instead associated with lower FRN vote totals. These findings challenge the conclusions of previous analyses of populist-right voting and provide further evidence that contact and threat dynamics often operate simultaneously, albeit at different levels.