Bridging the Parochial Divide: Closure and Brokerage in Mafia Families

• In Event: 562 - Regular Session. Social Networks

Abstract

Sociologists and network analysts have long argued that the occupancy of brokerage positions between otherwise weakly connected social groups yields power and access to novel resources. Brokerage activity is considerably more puzzling when access to key resources depends on good standing within a closed group, since those who maintain bridging ties beyond the group’s boundaries may be viewed with suspicion rather than rewarded for their diversity of interests. Yet, such arrangements have another—less straightforward—implication: by restricting access to group-controlled resources to “insiders,” they paradoxically empower “outsiders” to act as brokers, since they alone can do so without risking their privileged access to group resources. I find evidence for this mechanism in a unique dataset with information on 707 members and associates of mid-century American-Italian mafia families. I show that a small number of ethnic non-Italians played a disproportionately large role in interfamily exchange, especially when families were characterized by high internal closure. The results reveal a division of network labor in which actors excluded from dominant institutional arrangements weave integrative linkages from the boundaries generated by parochial solidarity.

Author

• Daniel Joseph DellaPosta, Cornell University