Using longitudinal data on 343 young adults, the present study investigated the social ties involved in young adults' work-related goals, how these ties change during transition to working life, and whether social ties contribute to success in dealing with the transition. The results showed that goal-relevant social ties reflected changes in the…

This paper has two purposes. The first purpose is to develop a better understanding of the process of starting an after-school program for Japanese heritage language learners. The second purpose is to develop a better understanding of parents' expectations of their children's heritage language education. Interviews with two Japanese mothers whose…

Benchmarking information technology services has become a vital activity for colleges and universities. The COSTS Project (http://www.costsproject.org/) is an ongoing quantitative effort to benchmark the costs of providing IT services in higher education; the project helps institutions understand their IT budgets and staffing relative to peer…

Meaning matters in the way people form social ties. Adopting an unconventional analytic technique--the Galois lattice analysis--I show how network researchers can uncover relational meanings using conventional research techniques (i.e., closed-ended network surveys). Galois lattice analysis also inspires new ways of conceptualizing relational…

Predicting MBA student performance for admission decisions is crucial for educational institutions. This paper evaluates the ability of three different models--neural networks, logit, and probit to predict MBA student performance in graduate programs. The neural network technique was used to classify applicants into successful and marginal student…

Immigrant youth often rebuild their friendships and other social networks after arriving in a new country. The difficulties involved can threaten their psychosocial development. Formation of social networks needs to be understood within the macro sociocultural context that shapes the experience. Nonetheless, the current literature on social…

This paper examines the contribution of peer relations to delinquency from the perspective of two sociological traditions: socialization/normative influence and opportunity. Earlier studies have likely overestimated normative influence by relying on respondents' reports about their friends' behaviors rather than obtaining independent assessments…

Non-searchers--people who get their jobs without engaging in a job search--are often excluded from investigations of the role of personal relationships in job finding processes. This practice fails to capture the scope of informal job matching activity and underestimates the effectiveness of social capital. Moreover, studies typically obtain…

Efforts to create systemic change in most organizations stall despite an intense push from leadership because these efforts are built on a model that does not accurately represent how organizations truly operate. Reeves argues that most leaders attempt to communicate directives about new initiatives from the top layer of a hierarchy downwards.…

Digital technology is redrawing the library's blueprint. Planners are thinking in new ways about how to design libraries as places for learning rather than primarily as storehouses of information. This thinking has given rise to much discussion--and to many publications--about the "library as place." In this article, the author asks why not also…

The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the challenges African-American women in abusive relationships face when they consider seeking-help from their informal networks. Data are reported from interviews with 15 African-American women who were self-identified as having survived physical intimate partner violence. A 13-item,…

This article deals with the power wielded by the primary industry partners in knowledge-intensive networks in the new materials development technology field. Industry partners have a disproportionate influence on the structure and functioning of networks. The power can be explicit or invisible and is mediated and reshaped by factors such as the…

Guided by family stress theory, relations among neighborhood stress, maternal psychological functioning, and parenting were examined among 123 low-income, urban-dwelling, African American single mothers. Using a longitudinal design, structural equation modeling was employed to test the hypothesis that neighborhood stress results in poorer…

Reviews principal theoretical developments in the study of schools as organizations, particularly neo-institutional theory and analysis of faculty workplace. Discusses a theoretical approach integrating these developments including institutional constraints on schools, administrative responses to them, and networks of informal faculty ties.…

In this article we describe the evolving structure of the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF), a sociotechnical interaction network (STIN) designed to support a Web-based community of in-service and preservice mathematics and science teachers sharing, improving, and creating inquiry-based pedagogical practices. Specifically, we apply activity theory as…