Engaging with Social Networks: The Bourdieu-Becker Encounter Revisited

Abstract

Economic implications of social networks are of great importance and economic motives may well play crucial roles in network formation and dissipation. Although historically speaking the mainstream economics' attention to the subject had rather been limited, in the previous couple of decades, the economics discipline developed its own branch of social network analysis and incorporated in their analysis individuals' networking decisions based on a standard Beckerian cost-benefit calculus. In understanding the scope of this new branch in economics discipline to incorporate social dimensions of the economy, this article aims to bring a Bourdieusian critique toward this approach, given that Bourdieu had been critical to a Beckerian cost-benefit reductionism in decision-making and had himself developed his own approach to social relations.

Keywords:

• social networks
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Gary Becker
• social capital

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Asimina Christoforou for her very constructive comments. The usual caveat applies.

Notes

¹ Another line of research (Snijders, Steglich, & Schweinberger, 2007) studies homophily as a co-evolutionary process of networks and behavior: connections among those who have similar characteristics not only have an impact on the behavior of actors but can also change the individual characteristics of actors.

² In his analysis, Bourdieu extensively used economics language (i.e., terms such as capital, game, interest, and market), and was often criticized for “economizing” his sociological language and thus adhering to the “economic approach to human behavior” à la Becker (for a detailed discussion, see Lebaron, 2003). In response to this criticism, Bourdieu stated that he was careful not to fall in an economic reductionist trap, and clearly declared that “[t]he only thing I share with economic orthodoxy … are a number of words” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 118).

³ de Nooy (2003) suggests that Bourdieu's social capital can be interpreted as the intersubjective ties that the techniques of social network analysis focus on.