Adolescent societies—whether arising from weak, short-term classroom friendships or from close, long-term friendships—exhibit various levels of network clustering, segregation, and hierarchy. Some are rank-ordered caste systems and others are flat, cliquish worlds. Explaining the source of such structural variation remains a challenge, however, because global network features are generally treated as the agglomeration of micro-level tie-formation mechanisms, namely balance, homophily, and dominance. How do the same micro-mechanisms generate significant variation in global network structures? To answer this question we propose and test a network ecological theory that specifies the ways features of organizational environments moderate the expression of tie-formation processes, thereby generating variability in global network structures across settings. We develop this argument using longitudinal friendship data on schools (Add Health study) and classrooms (Classroom Engagement study), and by extending exponential random graph models to the study of multiple societies over time.

In recent years there has been a growing call to historicize sociology by paying more attention to the contextual importance of time and place as well as to issues of process and contingency. Meeting this goal requires bringing historical sociology and interactionism into greater conversation via a historical theory of social situations. Toward this end, the authors of this article draw on Erving Goffman's work in Frame Analysis to conceptualize experience in social situations as grounded in multilayered cognitive frames and to demonstrate how such a framework helps illuminate historical changes in situated interaction.

No abstract

No abstract