opportunity structures

Examples of opportunity structures in the following topics:

• Illegitimate Opportunity Structures: Social Class and Crime

  • Illegitimate opportunity structures are the rules that operate within deviant subcultures.
  • Illegitimate opportunity structures are the rules that operate within deviant subcultures.
  • Cowan and Ohlin used juvenile delinquency as a case study to explore this theory of illegitimate opportunity structures.
  • Finally, in a retreatist subculture youth learn to reject both legitimate and illegitimate opportunity structures.
  • The retreatist subculture is the exception that proves the rule of illegitimate opportunity structures.

• Resource Mobilization Approach

  • movements develop in contingent opportunity structures, which are external factors that may either limit or bolster the movement, that influence their efforts to mobilize.
  • Examples of opportunity structures may include elements, such as the influence of the state, a movement's access to political institutions, etc.
  • As each movement's response to the opportunity structures depends on the movement's organization and resources, there is no clear pattern of movement development nor are specific movement techniques or methods universal.

• Structural equivalence

  • In figure 12.1 there are seven "structural equivalence classes."
  • E and F, however, fall in the same structural equivalence class.
  • Finally, actors H and I fall in the same structural equivalence class.
  • Actors that are structurally equivalent are in identical "positions" in the structure of the diagram.
  • Whatever opportunities and constraints operate on one member of a class are also present for the others.

• Summary

  • This chapter and the next are concerned with the ways in which networks display "structure" or deviation from random connection.
  • In the current chapter, we've approached the same issue of structuring from the "top-down" by looking at patterns of macro-structure in which individuals are embedded in non-random ways.
  • The tools in the current chapter provide some ways of examining the "texture" of the structuring of the whole population.
  • In the next chapter we will focus on the same issue of connection and structure from the "bottom-up. " That is, we'll look at structure from the point of view of the individual "ego."
  • Taken together, the approaches in chapters 8 and 9 illustrate, again, the "duality" of social structure in which individuals make social structures, but do so within a matrix of constraints and opportunities imposed by larger patterns.

• External Sources of Social Change

  • Generally, a theory of change should include elements such as structural aspects of change (like population shifts), processes and mechanisms of social change, and directions of change.
  • It argues that the success or failure of social movements is primarily affected by political opportunities.
  • Political Process Theory is similar to resource mobilization theory (which considers the mobilization of resources to be the key ingredient of a successful movement) in many regards, and emphasizes political opportunities as the social structure that is important for social movement development.
  • Finally, "political opportunity" refers to the receptivity or vulnerability of the existing political system to challenge.
  • This has presented culture theorists an opportunity to expound on the importance of culture.

• Summary

  • Structural equivalence is the most "concrete" form of equivalence.
  • Two actors are exactly structurally equivalent if they have exactly the same ties to exactly the same other individual actors.
  • Pure structural equivalence can be quite rare in social relations, but approximations to it may not be so rare.
  • In studying a single population, two actors who are approximately structurally equivalent are facing pretty much the same sets of constraints and opportunities.
  • Commonly we would say that two actors who are approximately structural equivalent are in approximately the same position in a structure.

• Summary

  • In this section we have discussed the idea of "structural equivalence" of actors, and seen some of the methodologies that are most commonly used to measure structural equivalence, find patterns in empirical data, and describe the sets of "substitutable" actors.
  • Exact structural equivalence is rare in most social structures (one interpretation of exact structural equivalence is that it represents systematic redundancy of actors; which may be functional in some way to the network).
  • The first step in examining structural equivalence is to produce a "similarity" or a "distance" matrix for all pairs of actors.
  • An alternative interpretation is that actors who are structurally equivalent face nearly the same matrix of constraints and opportunities in their social relationships.
  • And, structural analysis, is primarily concerned with the more general and abstract idea of the roles or positions that define the structure of the group -- rather than the locations of specific actors with regard to specific others.

• Political Opportunity Theory

  • Describe how and why political opportunities are important to social movements according to political opportunity theory.

• Introduction: Groups and sub-structures

  • One of the most common interests of structural analysts is in the "sub-structures" that may be present in a network.
  • Divisions of actors into groups and sub-structures can be a very important aspect of social structure.
  • We can also look for sub-structure from the "top-down."
  • Weaker parts in the "social fabric" also create opportunities for brokerage and less constrained action.
  • So, the numbers and sizes of regions, and their "connection topology" may be consequential for predicting both the opportunities and constraints facing groups and actors, as well as predicting the evolution of the graph itself.

• Summary

  • The fundamental idea here is that the ways in which individuals are attached to macro-structures is often by way of their local connections.
  • It is the local connections that most directly constrain actors, and provide them with access to opportunities.
  • In the next several chapters we will examine additional concepts and algorithms that have been developed in social network analysis to describe important dimensions of the ways in which individuals and structures interact.