Ties that Bind/Unwind: The Social, Economic, and Organizational Contexts of Sharing Networks

• Author: Katherine S. Newman
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716220923335
• Published date: 01 May 2020
• Date: 01 May 2020

192 ANNALS, AAPSS, 689, May 2020

DOI: 10.1177/0002716220923335

Ties that Bind/

Unwind: The

Social,

Economic, and

Organizational

Contexts of

Sharing

Networks

By

KATHERINE S. NEWMAN

923335ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYThe Contexts of Sharing Networks

research-article2020

This commentary provides a synthetic overview and

analytic framework for understanding the papers in this

volume of The ANNALS, which focuses on sharing

networks in a comparative context. Economic crises

endemic to capitalist societies generate the need for

support networks, while welfare state configurations

influence their importance as an additional survival

tool. Social norms set the stage for the degrees of reci-

procity and durable obligation that networks engender

and the boundary conditions that enable or disable the

most vulnerable members of the social hierarchy to tap

the resources of more privileged contacts.

Keywords: social networks; economic crises; poverty;

reciprocity

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, two of

the leading lights in behavioral economics,

lead readers into the cognitive jungle that is

poverty in their 2014 book, Scarcity. Their mis-

sion is to reveal the underlying logic beneath

what appears to be the most self-defeating

aspects of life at the bottom of the class ladder.

In particular, they highlight the toll that unpre-

dictability takes on people who are fully capable

of “delayed gratification,” but for whom practic-

ing long-term thinking makes no sense. This

group of people cannot count on the steady flow

of resources that is the bedrock of middle-class

economic logic and instead must focus on get-

ting through today and tomorrow. While next

week or next month is not too far off to imagine,

it is too far away to plan for. Their underlying

message: poverty takes an exhausting toll on

Katherine S. Newman is Torrey Little Professor of

Sociology and interim chancellor of the University of

Massachusetts, Boston. She is the author of fifteen books

on topics such as urban poverty, downward mobility,

poverty and policy, and lethal violence in American

schools. Her most recent book is Downhill from Here:

Retirement Insecurity in the Age of Inequality

(Metropolitan Books 2019).

Correspondence: Katherine.Newman@umb.edu