‘Everybody knows him’: Social networks in the life of a small contractor in Alabama

Abstract

The importance of social networks and social capital has been well established, but our understanding of exactly how people maintain useful ties, and how those ties operate day to day, is less advanced. In this article, I examine the networks of a self-employed construction contractor in the Sand Mountain area of Alabama who relies entirely on networks for job referrals. Though the core of his business comes from people in his own and related occupations, I argue that his use of purely social ties, maintained by extensive socializing, are also crucial, and that forms of conversation with no obvious utility, such as gossip, are actually central to his ability to maintain extremely large and occupationally valuable networks. © 2005, Sage Publications. All rights reserved.