Culture and Networks in Everyday Interaction: Ambivalent Ties in a Housing Coalition

• In Event: 571 - Section on Sociology of Culture Paper Session. Culture and Networks: Connections, Meaning and Beyond

Abstract

How do civic coalitions cohere amidst potentially fractious tensions? We introduce the notion of ambivalent inter-organizational ties, and investigate those ties in housing advocacy networks in a large, western U.S. city. Our study combines ethnographic and structural network survey research on an urban housing advocacy coalition, a breakaway coalition, and a larger field of organizations with some involvement in housing advocacy. The ethnographic evidence makes it possible for us to investigate two analytic levels of culture, explicit and implicit culture, whose distinct contributions to network relations have not been articulated systematically. We suggest that this “cultural-interactionist approach to culture improves our grasp of the sources of ambivalent attachment, and potential fissuring, in a network over what structural network analysis offers alone. It grasps puzzling findings that a focus on only one level of culture would miss. We propose two pathways by which network-structural and cultural factors work together in everyday interaction to produce either highly ambivalent or else relatively low-ambivalence ties between organizations in a coalition.

Authors

• Paul R. Lichterman, University of Southern California

• Nicole Esparza, University of Southern California

• Christopher Weare, University of Southern California