Network Effects and Social Inequality
By Paul Dimaggio, F. Garip. 2012
553 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Students of social inequality have noted the presence of mechanisms militating toward cumulative advantage and increasing inequality. Social scientists have established that individuals' choices are influenced by those of their network peers in many social domains. We suggest that the ubiquity of network effects and tendencies toward cumulative advantage are related. Inequality is exacerbated when effects of individual differences are multiplied by social networks: when persons must decide whether to adopt beneficial practices; when network externalities, social learning, or normative pressures influence adoption decisions; and when networks are homophilous with respect to individual characteristics that predict such decisions. We review evidence from literatures on network effects on technology, labor markets, education, demography, and health; identify several mechanisms through which networks may generate higher levels of inequality than one would expect based on differences in initial endowments alone...
Subfields: Media Technology, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ad371da5c060cf50e181b9a1f153e8ca6ebf176c
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Citations in the corpus
- Drivers of human development: How relationships and context shape learning and development1 (2020, background): “Family assets that include social networks (DiMaggio & Garip, 2012) and cultural resources, such as religious institutions, can help families address the impacts of poverty.”
- The One Percent (2014, background): “Finally, we know that social network processes affect income inequality (DiMaggio & Garip 2012), but we know little about how these affect wealth concentration.”
- Unpacking the inequality paradox: The psychological roots of inequality and social class. (2018, background): “In these contexts, class boundaries, routines, norms, and principles of homophily define network access and centrality and are thus disproportionately likely to leave lower-class individuals on the periphery, or left out completely, of social networks (DiMaggio & Garip, 2012; Jencks & Mayer, 1990).”