cover image: The neighbours: a breath of social air? Local relationships and homogeneity in personal networks

The neighbours: a breath of social air? Local relationships and homogeneity in personal networks

1 Jan 2024

For several decades, the question of the intensification of urban segregation observed in large urban areas has been intertwined with the question of the formation of the social homogeneity and cohesion in local relations and has fueled the urban desegregation policies implemented in Western countries. While many research study the role of neighborhood relations in this process of homogenization of sociability, few researches contextualize these relations in the overall social life of individuals and compare them to the other social circles (work, friends, school, etc.). Based on a survey of personal networks conducted in 2017 in the Toulouse region, we study the place of neighbourhood relationships in networks to see whether and to what extent these relationships participate in the formation of "entre-soi" (understood as a sociability that is both homogeneous and cohesive). To do this, we distinguish between two types of local relationships: relationships created with neighbours and those formed with what we call more-than-neighbours. Overall, this article shows that relationships with neighbours provide more social openness than relationships with more-than-neighbours and those outside the local space. It is rather the other contexts of activity (work, groups of friends, associations, etc.) that contribute to reinforce the homogeneity of personal networks and make them more cohesive.

Authors

Lydie Launay, Guillaume Favre

Bibliographic Reference
Lydie Launay, Guillaume Favre. Les voisins : une bouffée d'air social ? Relations locales et entre-soi dans les réseaux personnels. Sociologie, A paraître. ⟨halshs-04330142⟩
HAL Collection
["Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société", 'Université Toulouse 2', 'CNRS - Centre national de la recherche scientifique', 'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales', 'Archives ouvertes de la Sociologie', 'SOCIOLOGIE', 'Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Solidarités, Sociétés, Territoires', 'Campus-AAR', 'Collection LaCAS - Open Archives in Language and Cultural Area Studies']
HAL Identifier
4330142
Institution
['École des hautes études en sciences sociales', 'Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès', "École Nationale Supérieure de Formation de l'Enseignement Agricole de Toulouse-Auzeville"]
Laboratory
Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Solidarités, Sociétés, Territoires
Published in
France

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