Amy Jacobs

Telephone sociability networks

This article aims to contribute to social network analysis through a study of telephone sociability. After reviewing the procedures used for apprehending the structure of sociability networks, several types of personal networks are defined through an analysis of relations conducted by telephone. While some of these networks involve a mere sum of interpersonal ties, with networks composed of a full set of different types of ties contrasting sharply with those characterized by virtual absence of all ties, others reveal the existence of networks based on preference, where the relevant opposition is between two types of exclusive ties: family and friendship. Social status does not suffice to understand such relational choices ; these seem to involve instead a variety of distinctions associated with two relatively new modes of life : living alone and living outside the world of work. When these new dimensions are used to read these different types of sociability, we see that increasingly complex factors need to be invoked to understand social behaviors.

The invention of the peasantry : a moment in the history of post-world war II French sociology

In the 1960s, researchers and scholars with very different approaches to studying the peasantry met up in Paris. For American anthropologists, the peasantry in Europe and South America constituted a new field of study ; French geographers and historians (particularly Medievalists) had amassed a great number of regional studies ; the tradition of the populist Russian agronomists had been rediscovered ; and Marxist economists and sociologists were trying to account for vestiges of the peasantry in light of Marxs prediction that peasants would disappear. These different disciplines and approaches, in part impelled by the French agricultural revolution and the repeated failure of socialist-run agriculture, were able to develop together a theory of the peasantry.