ECOLOGICAL AFFILIATION AND BLAU SPACE

Miller McPherson used the Blau space model to explain how organizations change over time in response to their composition. This model, he argues, can be applied to study other entities such as preferences, schemas, and meanings.

Industrial societies are very complex and exhibit great social differentiation. Social space has evolved into numerous dimensions. This differentiation can be represented in its simplest form on a two-dimensional grid, with traits such as social rank and material wealth as its axis. In such a grid, the points represent individuals. McPherson defines social structure as the probably of contact between two people. This definition explains the organization of the points (people) in Blau space (McPherson 2004).

The points on the grid can be randomly associated (which does not occur with social phenomena), or they can have homophilous association. With homophilous association, the probability of contact between two people is a declining function of distance in Blau space. When two points are distant from each other, the probability of contact is very small. Network distance, then, is produced by distance in dimensions in Blau space. The homophily principle applies to almost all social distinctions, such as age, race, gender, height, education.

Organizations can also be represented on the grid, as boxes overlapping with the points or individuals who belong to them. If a random sample of individuals and a random sample of organizations are represented on the grids, the boxes will be located where the most people are. The boxes or organizations are not static; they change in response to the exit and entry of new members and where they are located in Blau space. New members might mean that the organization changes little, that its mean shifts, or that it acquires increased variance (for details on how organizations change, see McPherson, Popielarz, and Drobnic 1992). Underlying this organizational model is the homophily principle: network connections between people inside the organization and those outside it dictate the entry into and exit from the organization.

Organizational change constitutes a dynamic process as organizations grow and decline, expand and contract, and move around. This system can be modeled with a set of equations. Organizations (as well as any other niche represented in Blau space) compete for people’s limited time and energy. There are forces of attraction and repulsion in this model, as boxes jostle each other and produce over time “the dance of the adaptive landscape”. Niches form social entities, and they spread and contract in dynamic interaction with other niches. This model explains change in the mean of the niche, change in the dispersion of the niche, and change in the density of exploitation in the niche (see McPherson 1983 for more on the ecological model of the competition of social organizations).

This model can be expanded beyond organizations to situate preferences, identities, cultural artifacts, and meanings in Blau space. Such entities will also be clustered into niches. The location and size of these niches fluctuates over time; new social forms are more likely in regions with heavily overlapped membership, and old social forms are most likely to die in overlapped regions. Conflicting social forms are more likely to occur in overlapped regions. This model can explain why certain attitudes, or memberships, or marriages, or don’t occur.

The family can be conceptualized as an entity in Blau space, and as such will overlap with other entities. The attitudes, beliefs, associations, and other social entities that inhabit the family niche are measurable. Changes in family structure are associated with changes in other entities in the niche.

This model is advantageous in that it is applicable to all social survey variables. It provides a metric for understanding the relationships among a wide variety of social entities, and it provides a dynamic model which combines entities into populations, communities, and systems.

Miller’s presentation raised the following questions:

· The effect of large historical events on Blau space

· Role for agency in the model

Events such as a war alter the composition of Blau space, by pulling out the young men from the system. The model, however, does not specifically address agency. It focuses on the dimensions of Blau space which characterize positions under the homophily principle.

The main principles of the model are the central importance of thinking ecologically and the importance of homophily.

Date: 2015-01-12; view: 1239