Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life (review)

To date, sociological research on social capital has mostly treated it as an individual attribute that is the product of the number and type of connections an individual has with other individuals. While generally successful, this research also developed in ways that were enabled by social network analysis, sometimes at the expense of other dimensions of social capital such as the contexts and settings that shape its development. Mario Luis Small's new book on childcare centers in New York corrects this bias and will decisively reorient sociological research on social capital away from network connections among individuals to the organizational and institutional settings that enable and constrain network connections. He calls this the "organizational embeddedness perspective."

To address the gap he identifies in social capital research, Small takes a methodologically pluralistic approach that utilizes different methods and data sources to address the key question: the significance of organizations and institutions in the production of social capital. For individual-level data he utilizes the Fragile Families Survey in combination with in-depth interviews of parents who make use of the centers he studied. For organizational data he utilizes a survey of 300 centers alongside case studies of 23 centers. The choice of childcare centers is admirable. The organizational and institutional variety encompassed by childcare centers and the constant nature of client interest enables Small to capture significant variety and range within a nonetheless usefully delimited object of analysis. Small's brilliance as a sociologist shines through in the research design which yields data that are straightforward and convincing. As a consequence, Small has no need to yield ground to conceptual imprecision or interpretive license. This book is an excellent example of the positive benefits of skillful research design, especially in combination with multiple methods.

The analytical content of the book is straightforward and clear. Each chapter considers a key question contained in the subtitle. Often the chapters open with questions that emerge from qualitative interview data which are then precisely answered using quantitative data. Small finds that the well-being of mothers was higher when they had children in daycare, and that such mothers were less likely to be socially isolated. This well-being is closely tied to the friendships mothers make in childcare centers, friendships that are, in part, produced by the way centers reconfigure how mothers use their time. Centers encourage participation and cooperation while also enabling time-constrained mothers to pursue multiple goals at once.

In addition to these useful findings, Small discovers that strong ties predominate at the center, but they are also "domain-specific," that is, they tend not to carry over to settings beyond childcare. This combination of the characteristics of "weak" and "strong" ties is probed by Small to reveal that in forming these types of ties mothers are taking advantage of the relationship-sustaining "work" that is accomplished by the organization.

Usefully for people with more of a background studying organizations, Small goes beyond interpersonal ties to consider inter-organizational ties. Here he is on much less firm ground and makes much less use of the existing literature, but he nonetheless establishes his key point. Namely, childcare centers act as "brokers" that connect mothers not just to other mothers but to other organizations and their resources. These ties do not simply produce more of what social ties produce, but add distinctive value to the utility of the centers.

One can quibble with aspects of Small's treatment, but most of these issues are not central to the analysis. There is an issue with the framing of the book since, for many, social capital is a concept that is specifically designed to highlight the importance of organizations (though the salience of organizations is usually assumed in this literature rather than demonstrated). Small mobilizes his findings to question Wilson's deinstitutionalization thesis even though he does not have the longitudinal and comparative data necessary to address it. An issue of greater analytical salience...