To Dwell among Friends - Chs. 1 & 19
 

This book inquires into the nature of social relationships in urban life. In spite of the lack of solid scientific evidence, it has been almost an accepted truism that social life tend to deteriorate in cities. Many laymen, as well as number of academics, believe that social relationships in cities compared to the rural areas are characterized by shallowness, transientness, solitude, isolation, and so forth. Is it really so? Is social life in cities really worse in quality compared to that of the rural area? If so, in what sense and what aspects of city life contribute to this deterioration? These are the kind of questions asked in this book. And the conclusion from the survey study conducted in Northern California - hardly so. In fact, there is little evidence that social relationships in cities are worse in quality than that of the rural area. The difference is not one of quality, but rather one of composition, the author reports in the end. For instance, city-dwellers are much more likely to have greater number of non-kin friends, while in general associating less with their kinsmen. Meanwhile, it is true that in general the social composition of cities is more heterogeneous and variegated - cities attract diverse sorts of cultural, ethnic and social groups, including those who are likely to be considered "atypical" by the main-stream standard. For these out-of-mainstream people, the social life in cities are likely to be much more congenial, as there are greater chances that they will find enough number of people who share their cultural, ethnic or social traits and outlook. In short, while social life in cities do not differ markedly in terms of quality, although it does differ to significant extent from the rural ones in terms of style of life. Not to mention the presence of these "atypical" people, people in cities in general hold much less traditional attitude toward social life. While self-selection explains part of this difference between city and rural life, the author claims that urban life itself has significant influences on people's networks and social relationships. Just exactly which aspects of city life that contribute to this difference is not so clear at this point, though the author seems to think that sheer population density difference is one of the crucial factor.
 

Chapter 1

This chapter explicates more closely on the overall theoretical and methodological framework the study adopts. First, it is made explicit that in order to probe into the issue of social relationships fully the method adopted is one of the network analysis. One of the primary advantage of this framework is that it does not treat individuals as dupes totally constrained by structural factors; it portrays people as agents capable of choosing and forming their own pattern of social relationships according to their outlook, liking, values, cultural dispositions, and so forth. Nevertheless, of course there are structural limits to how much individuals can freely formulate their own social relationships. Patterns of social circumstances - jobs, family commitments, income, and similar conditions - constrain individuals' agency in formulating social ties and predispose them to certain patterns of relationships. In fact, Fischer loosely defines the term social structure as these patterns of circumstances. Of course, in this particular work, what we are particularly interested in is one type of social structure - residential community, and particularly that of urbanism. Then, how might this urbanism affect people's social relationships? A thesis and a counterthesis is offered here - the former, which has been the dominant theory for rather long time since the days of the Chicago school, states that urbanism contributes to the weakening of social ties, as people associate with each other in superficial and impersonal ways. The counterthesis offers a somewhat different picture. According to that view cities intensify the distinctiveness of subcultures. As many of these subcultures reach the "critical mass" to become the worlds unto themselves, then the larger city comes to be the congregation of "little worlds". It is in this context that the somewhat more optimistic view that social life in cities differ only in style, but not in quality, is asserted.
 

Chapter 19

This chapter summarizes the empirical findings of the last 17 chapters. The review is divided into three sections: how people differed in their networks in terms of their own personal background, how the networks of urban and small-town people differed, and what does that difference mean for the city life in a broader context. So, first topic is the difference in people's networks due to personal traits. Effects of education, income, gender, life cycle (age) are noted of. Effects of ethnicity and race are reported to be unclear, perhaps because of a methodological limitation. Among the personal background variables, education is reported to be the most influential factor in effecting the type and nature of social networks. The more education they have, the more socially active and more ties they had in general. Highly educated people's networks were also notably less interconnected. Income also had a strong positive effect in fostering the quantity and quality of network formation - this finding may cast a serious doubt on the notion of "working class solidarity". It is likely that the possession of concrete resources people can draw upon due to higher income is largely the reason as to why higher income contributes to better network ties. Age had differing effects for men and women. In general, men tended to get more and more constricted in number and quality of support they can expect as they get older. On the other hand, for women the burden during the younger age - childbearing and raising - tended to have large negative effects on forming ties outside family, kin and neighbors.

So, next comes the main topic of the effects of urbanism on personal networks. Again, the big theme here is that although personal networks in cities differ in styles, but not in quality. There is no solid evidence that urbanism contributes to deterioration of social life, personal isolation, or psychological disturbances. Again, the difference is largely that of style, rather than quality. Urban residents did tend to have larger number of "just friends", and tended to be more selective in associating with ins and relatives. As predicted by the counterthesis, urban residence did seem to encourage association with those of their own specific subcultures - especially in terms of religion and ethnic groups. Notably, urban residents tended to have much less traditional outlook and attitudes than the rural ones. Where do these differences come from? Again, the author's point is that while it is largely attributable to the process of self-selection (in fact, the city-rural difference in terms of age and educational differences is getting sharper in recent times), urbanism also has its own independent feedback effects that effect the pattern of people's network formation in a distinctive way. In the latter process, population concentration - having the effect of fostering the greater subcultural involvement - is seen as the key aspect of city life that leads to this effect of urbanism on personal networks.