Network Persistence and the Axis of Hierarchy

List of Illustrations; Preface; Chapter One Sticky Struggles: The Unified Pattern of Social Ranks Inherent in Networks; Chapter Two Foundations of Cacophony; Chapter Three Knots of Regularity; Chapter Four Hierarchy: Inevitable but Inevitably Messy; Chapter Five The Inevitable Emergence of Stratification; Chapter Six Scaling Intergenerational Continuity: Is Occupational Inheritance Ascriptive After All?; Chapter Seven Taming the Mobility Table; Chapter Eight Is Occupational Mobility Declining in the United States?; Chapter Nine The Continuum of Class over Time: Deconstructing Imposed Class to Uncover Empirical Classes; Chapter Ten Concluding Reflections; Appendix: Why Robust Attraction Is (Effectively) Inevitable for Mobility Data; Index.

“This important and highly original text advances a novel interactional understanding of stratification as founded in networks and the ‘stickiness’ of social ties. This ‘minimalist’ account sees stratification sustained in the constraints of interactional social ties and generated by local—not global—rules. Offering a radical alternative to conventional accounts of stratification, Rytina shows that their insights can be understood through key features of interaction/networks with no need to move beyond local networks to the imposed ‘universal’ properties of social systems. This is essential reading for scholars seeking to understand the durability—but also the mutability—of stratification.” —Wendy Bottero, Reader in Sociology, University of Manchester, UK