The Influence of Simmel on American Sociology Since 1975

Brocic, Milos; Silver, Daniel

doi:10.1146/annurev-soc-090320-033647

Cited by 9 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 118 publications

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“…Understanding this phenomenon in distinct contexts is important for consolidating policies or building mechanisms that aim to reduce polarization, whether online or offline [23]. Such research could build on recent work outlining the different functions of cross-partisan brokerage [41,42] by elaborating the role of neutral bubble reachers. Drawing on our earlier discussion, this could mean exploring their role in topical "agenda-setting".…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reaching the bubble may not be enough: news media role in online political polarization

et al. 2022

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Politics in different countries show diverse degrees of polarization, which tends to be stronger on social media, given how easy it became to connect and engage with like-minded individuals on the web. A way of reducing polarization would be by distributing cross-partisan news among individuals with distinct political orientations, i.e., “reaching the bubbles”. This study investigates whether this holds in the context of nationwide elections in Brazil and Canada. We collected politics-related tweets shared during the 2018 Brazilian presidential election and the 2019 Canadian federal election. Next, we proposed an updated centrality metric that enables identifying highly central bubble reachers, nodes that can distribute content among users with diverging political opinions—a fundamental metric for the proposed study. After that, we analyzed how users engage with news content shared by bubble reachers, its source, and its topics, considering its political orientation. Among other results, we found that, even though news media disseminate content that interests different sides of the political spectrum, users tend to engage considerably more with content that aligns with their political orientation, regardless of the topic.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reaching the bubble may not be enough: news media role in online political polarization

et al. 2022

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“…Finally, there is an extensive literature on the strength, shape, and structure of ties and their consequences (e.g., Broćić & Silver, 2021; Burt, 1992; Granovetter, 1973; Krackhardt, 1999; Lemaire & Provan, 2017; Tortoriello & Krackhardt, 2010; Uzzi, 1997). Our board-level analysis largely ignores the specific ties of trustees and subsequently the characteristics of those ties.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These three features of trusteeship suggest that the individual members of a board—and, crucially, the board itself—are positioned on the university’s boundaries. Organizational actors on the boundary play crucial roles in determining what is brought into and what is filtered from the organization itself (Broćić & Silver, 2021; Colyvas & Powell, 2006; Krackhardt, 1999; Krackhardt & Kilduff, 2002; Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010). Coordinating university activities with imperatives from other fields, such as industry or government, is in a sense part of the job of trusteeship (Slaughter & Taylor, 2016).…”

Section: Boards Universities and Multiple Fieldsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In either case, trustees might help to span boundaries between universities and actors in other fields. Boundary-spanning actors can both influence and be influenced by the entities that they span (Broćić & Silver, 2021; Burt, 1992; Krackhardt, 1999; Lemaire & Provan, 2017; Tortoriello & Krackhardt, 2010). University trustees typically are powerful actors who can span boundaries, facilitate cross-field alliances, stabilize resource flows, and regularize communication (Barringer & Riffe, 2018; Barringer & Slaughter, 2016).…”

Section: Boards Universities and Multiple Fieldsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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University Board Connectivity, Finances, and Research Production, 1985–2015

Taylor

Barringer

Slaughter

2022

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

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Background/context: A growing body of evidence indicates that trustees link the boards of research universities to organizations in other fields. It is less clear whether these board characteristics indicate distinct university contexts with which particular activities would be associated. Research questions: We ask three questions. The first two are descriptive and focus attention on the changing characteristics of university boards: How do boards tie universities to other sectors of society? How has the composition of these ties changed over time? The third is inferential and attends to possible relationships between board characteristics and university activities over time: Are there relationships between board ties to external organizations and university activities? Research design: We answered our first two questions using descriptive analyses. We answered the third question using regression analyses, inclusive of fixed board-level effects, which estimated the within-unit association among board characteristics, control characteristics, and the dependent variables associated with activities of interest. Data collection and analysis: Our sample consisted of the 54 boards that oversaw members of the Association of American Universities. Data were compiled in 10-year increments between 1985 and 2015. Historical data on university boards were created using Standard and Poor’s Register of Corporations, Directors, and Executives and the Capital IQ Personal Intelligence database, both of which provided time-verified data about the affiliations of individual trustees at a given moment in time (e.g., 1985, 1995). We merged these data with information on university characteristics drawn from existing secondary data sources. Findings: Consistent with other analyses, sampled boards were increasingly connected to organizations in other fields over time. Connections grew especially rapidly between 1995 and 2015, with particularly notable growth in ties to the finance industry. In inferential analyses, the total number of ties to external organizations was associated with increases in total publications and with the share of publications in the biological sciences. Board characteristics were not associated with variation in other variables (e.g., endowment growth). Conclusions/recommendations: Our findings suggest that board characteristics are more likely to be associated with some university activities than others. It is less clear why this is the case. Our paper therefore lays important groundwork for future research on the ways in which individual trustees may directly coordinate, indirectly facilitate, or be selected because of their ties to particular external organizations.

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“…Simmelian formal sociology aims to uncover "common formal patterns across substantively diverse contexts" (Zerubavel 2020:39). Because formal sociology is transportable, scalable, and relevant to multiple contexts, we can use case comparison and analogy to create and refine falsifiable propositions that extend beyond one social context to contexts that seem divergent (Broćić and Silver 2021;Land 2001;Prus 1987;Snow, Morrill, and Anderson 2003;Vaughan 2014;Zerubavel 2020).…”

Section: Formalizing the Service Trianglementioning

confidence: 99%

Workers and Their Foes: Customer Scapegoats in the Service Triad

Laemmli

2023

Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World

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The author reconceptualizes the service triangle as a Simmelian triad and draws on 16 months of fieldwork to analyze restaurant servers’ experiences of income and interactional precarity. Precarious work frustrates servers. However, triadic dynamics position customer scapegoats as responsible for servers’ frustrations. Employers passively benefit from this dynamic, which continually minimizes opposition to the structure of employment. This is a new mechanism for the reproduction of precarious service work that can explain why service workers consent to exploitation. These findings apply to workplaces in which workers experience low levels of autonomy and encounter customers who are interactionally salient and can control workers’ behavior. In such workplaces, the triadic dynamics identified in this article could weaken the potential for worker-customer alliances and complicate the promise of anti-tipping campaigns.

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The Influence of Simmel on American Sociology Since 1975

Cited by 9 publications

References 118 publications

Reaching the bubble may not be enough: news media role in online political polarization

Reaching the bubble may not be enough: news media role in online political polarization

University Board Connectivity, Finances, and Research Production, 1985–2015

Workers and Their Foes: Customer Scapegoats in the Service Triad

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