Books

Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everday Life
(2009, Oxford University Press)
amazon; barnes & noble; sem-coop

• C. Wright Mills Award for Best Book of 2009
• Mirra Komarovsky Best Book Award, Honorable Mention (2010)
• An excerpt: Preface and Chapter 1

Social capital theorists have shown that some people do better than others in part because they enjoy larger, more supportive, or otherwise more useful networks. But why do some people have better networks than others? Unanticipated Gains argues that the answer lies less in people's deliberate "networking" than in the institutional conditions of the churches, colleges, firms, gyms, childcare centers, schools, and other organizations in which they happen to participate routinely. The book illustrates and develops this argument by exploring the experiences of New York City mothers whose children were enrolled in childcare centers.

Unanticipated Gains examines why scores of these mothers, after enrolling their children in centers, dramatically expanded both the size and usefulness of their personal networks, often in ways they did not expect. Whether, how, and how much the mothers' networks were altered---and how useful these networks were---depended on the apparently trivial but remarkably consequential practices and regulations of the centers, from the structure of their PTOs, to the regularity of their fieldtrips to amusement parks and zoos, to their ostensibly innocuous rules regarding pick-up and drop-off times.

Relying on scores of in-depth interviews with mothers, quantitative data on both mothers and centers, and detailed case studies of other routine organizations (from beauty salons and bath houses to colleges and churches), Unanticiapted Gains shows that how much people gain from their connections depends substantially on institutional conditions they often do not control, and through everyday process they may not even be aware of.

From the back cover:

• "In this supreme work, Mario Luis Small does nothing less than transform the way that we understand social capital. With meticulous ethnographic fieldwork and a large body of data, he argues that social capital should no longer be conceptualized as individual action divorced from organizational context. To say that this multi-method case study is necessary reading alongside Coleman, Bourdieu, and Wilson is an understatement. Unanticipated Gains provides enormous leverage in explaining social inequality. Small provides a bold new agenda for sociology."
  Mitchell Duneier, Princeton University
  
• "Unanticipated Gains is a major contribution to the growing literature on social capital. Mario Small's original model of how social capital is influenced by organizational conditions is brilliantly applied to a case study of the experiences of mothers whose children were enrolled in child-care centers in New York. In the process he uncovered mechanisms that produce and perpetuate inequality in personal networks, and thereby provides direction for future research. Indeed, his notion of the 'organizational isolate' will become a key concept in future studies of formal organizations."
  William Julius Wilson, Harvard University
  
• "In Unanticipated Gains, Small suggests an entirely new way to think about our social relationships, situating them within the organizations that we work for, join, and patronize. Small keenly uncovers how these organizations set the parameters of our social worlds, and with an impressive variety of data, he shows that differences in organizations' brokering power is an overlooked source of inequality. This is a supremely smart book that makes it impossible to go back to the old ways of studying individuals outside of the groups within which they live their lives."
  Mary Pattillo, Northwestern University
  
• "Mixing focused interviews with observations both quantitative and qualitative, Small identifies in exquisite detail the mechanisms by which the simple acts of everyday life--enrolling a child in daycare--enmesh moms in networks of opportunity and obligation, strengthening their social ties with neighbors and others, thereby weaving the dense matrix of the urban landscape. A beautiful and richly conceived study."
  Peter Bearman, Columbia University
  

Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio
(2004, University of Chicago Press)
amazon; barnes & noble; sem-coop

• Robert E. Park Best Book Award (2005)
• C. Wright Mills Award for Best Book of 2004
• Mirra Komarovsky Best Book Award, Honorable Mention (2005)
• Sociology of Culture Section, ASA, Best Book Award, Honorable Mention (2005)

Villa Victoria examines how of a group of low-income Puerto Rican migrants with little formal education living in a Boston enclave resisted the efforts of the city to relocate them in the name of "urban renewal." After a succesful grassroots movement, the group earned the right to become developers of the parcel of land, creating, instead of a slew of luxury condominiums, a new mixed-income community of townhouses and public gathering areas, a community they named "Villa Victoria." Examining what happened next, and why, becomes an occasion to study the consequences of concentrated poverty and the sustainability of social capital.

Villa Victoria explains why social relations in this housing complex did not follow the expectations of standard sociological theories about the effects of concentrated poverty. The answer lies less in the neighborhood than in the theories, which do not consider how much the effects of neighborhood poverty depend on the conditions of the given neighborhood and of the city in which it is located.

From the back cover:

• "In this highly original ethnographic study, Mario Luis Small's systematic ethnographic research of a Boston barrio generates insights that lead to a critical examination and reconstruction of central theoretical arguments in the field of urban poverty. Small's contribution to our understanding of poverty and social capital is enormous. Indeed, Villa Victoria is one of the most creative and important studies of poor neighborhoods ever written."
  William Julius Wilson, Harvard University
  
• "Words like 'brilliant' and 'incisive' should not be used lightly, but in Villa Victoria we find a volume that merits high praise. Mario Small subjects ideas like social isolation and social capital to a searching theoretical critique and shows, through historically grounded field research, how they must be reconceptualized to account for changing forms of participation in Boston's Puerto Rican barrio. Small exemplifies the sociological imagination at its best and the field is in his debt for providing this landmark study of urban poverty."
  Katherine Newman, Princeton University
  
• "Small has written the most comprehensive, detailed, and engaging study of Villa Victoria to date. This book is a must read for those currently engaged in trying to transform the lives of Latinos and others in our inner cities through policy and community development."
  Felix Matos Rodriguez, Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos, Hunter College
  
• "Villa Victoria analyzes the scientific debate about the nature of slum communities that was touched off by the original 'culture of poverty' theories of the 1960s and then reawakened by William Julius Wilson's ideas about the truly disadvantaged. Mario Small cuts through the political fog that made these debates seem interminable and recommends what he calls a conditional mode of analysis that is more precise and useful. This is an excellent book."
  Howard Becker, author of Outsiders and Tricks of the Trade