Everything about Barry Wellman totally explained
Barry Wellman,
FRSC (b.
1942) directs
NetLab
as the S.D. Clark Professor of
Sociology at the
University of Toronto. His areas of research are
community sociology, the
Internet,
human-computer interaction and
social structure, as manifested in
social networks in
communities and
organizations. His overarching interest is in the paradigm shift from group-centered relations to
networked individualism. He has written more than 300 articles, chapters, reports and books. Many have been co-authored, with students comprising about half of his nearly 100 co-authors..
Among the concepts Wellman has published are: "the network city" (with Paul Craven), "the community question", "computer networks as social networks", "connected lives" (with Bernie Hogan), the "immanent Internet" (also with Bernie Hogan), "media-multiplexity" (with Caroline Haythornthwaite), "networked individualism" and "networked society", "personal community" and "personal network" and three with Anabel Quan-Haase: "hyperconnectivity", "local virtuality" and "virtual locality".
Wellman has received career achievement awards from the
Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, the
International Network for Social Network Analysis, and the
American Sociological Association's Community and Urban section and its Communication and Information Technologies section.
Early Life
Barry Wellman was born and raised in the
Grand Concourse and
Fordham Road area of the
Bronx,
New York City. He attended P.S. 33 and Creston J.H.S. 79, and was a
teenage member of the
Fordham Flames. He gained his high school degree from the
Bronx High School of Science in
1959. He received his A.B. (Bachelor's) degree
magna cum laude from
Lafayette College in
1963, majoring in social history and winning prizes in both history and religious studies. At Lafayette, he was a member of the McKelvy Honors House and captained the undefeated
1962 College Bowl team, whose final victory was over
Berkeley.
His graduate work was at
Harvard University, where he trained with Chad Gordon,
Charles Tilly and
Harrison White, and also studied with
Roger Brown,
George Homans,
Alex Inkeles,
Florence Kluckhohn,
Talcott Parsons and
Phillip J. Stone. He received a M.A. in
Social Relations in 1965 and a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1969. His focus was on
community, computer applications,
social networks and
self-conception, and his dissertation showed that the
social identities of
African-American and
White American Pittsburgh junior high school students were related to the extent of
segregation of their schools.
He has been married since 1965 to Beverly Wellman, a researcher in
complementary and alternative medicine.
Community Sociology
Wellman has been a faculty member of the Department of
Sociology at the
University of Toronto since 1967. Until 1990, he focused on
community sociology and
social network analysis. During his first three years in
Toronto, he also held a joint appointment with the
Clarke Institute of Psychiatry where he working with
D.B. Coates, M.D., co-directing the "Yorklea Study" in the Toronto borough of
East York. This first East York study, with data collected in 1968, attempted to do a field study of a large population, linking interpersonal relations with psychiatric symptoms. This early study of "
social support" documented the prevalence of non-local
friendship and
kinship ties, demonstrating that community is no longer confined to
neighborhood and studying non-local communities as
social networks. Wellman's "The Community Question" paper, reporting on this study, has been selected as one of the seven most important articles in English-Canadian sociology.
A second
East York study, conducted in 1978-1979 at the
University of Toronto's Centre for Urban and Community Studies, used in-depth interviews with 33 East Yorkers (originally surveyed in the first study) to learn more information about their social networks. It provided evidence about which kinds of ties and networks supply which types of
social support. It showed, for example, that sisters provide siblings with much emotional support, while parents provide financial aid. The support comes more from the characteristics of the ties than from the networks in which they're embedded. This research also demonstrated that wives maintain social networks for their husbands as well as for themselves.
Although Wellman's work has shifted primarily to studies of the Internet (see section below), he's continued collaborative analyses of the first and second East York studies, showing that reciprocity (like social support) is much more of a tie phenomenon than a social network phenomenon and that the frequency and supportiveness of interpersonal contact before the Internet was non-linearly associated with residential (and workplace)
distance.
Wellman has edited
Networks in the Global Village (1999), a book of original articles about personal networks around the world. In 2007, he edited a special issue, "The Network is Personal" of the journal,
Social Networks (vol. 29, no. 3, July), containing analyses from
Canada,
France,
Germany and
Iran.
Social Network Theory
Concomitant with his empirical work, Wellman has contributed to the theory of social network analysis. The most comprehensive statement is in his introductory article to
Social Structures, co-edited with the late
S.D. Berkowitz. This work reviews the history of social network thought, and suggests a number of basic principles of social network analysis.
More recent and more focused theoretical work has discussed the "glocalization" of contemporary communities (simultaneously "global" and "local") and the rise of "networked individualism" -- the transformation from group-based networks to individualized networks.
American Sociological Association career achievement award winner
Harrison White notes: ""Barry Wellman stands out as having devoted an entire career to exploring and documenting natural social worlds in network terms."
Social Network Methods
Wellman's methodological contributions have been for the analysis of ego-centered or "personal" networks -- defined from the standpoint of an individual (usually a person). As batches of personal networks are often studied, this calls for somewhat different techniques than the more common
social network practice of analyzing a single large network.
A 2007 paper, co-authored by Wellman (with Bernie Hogan and Juan-Antonio Carrasco), has discussed alternatives in gathering personal network data. A paper with Kenneth Frank showed how to tackle the problem of simultaneously analyzing personal network data on the two distinct levels of ties and networks. "Neighboring in Netville" has been cited as the only published study of personal networks from a known roster of potential network members. The most widely cited papers are the simplest: co-authored guides to analyzing personal network data while using the statistical software packages
SAS and
SPSS.
Other work by Wellman with
Howard D. White and associates has examined how to link social network analysis with the
scientometric study of citation networks. This research has shown that scholarly friends don't necessarily cite each other, but that scholars cited in the same article are apt to seek each other out and become friends.
Internet, Technology and Society
Wellman has often worked in collaboration with computer scientists, communication scientists and information scientists.
In
1990, he became involved in studying how ordinary people use the
Internet and other communication technologies to communicate and exchange information at work, at home and in the community. Thus his work has expanded his interest in non-local communities and social networks to encompass the Internet,
mobile phones and other information and communication technologies.
Work Networks and ICTs
Wellman's initial project ("Cavecat" which morphed into "
Telepresence") was in collaboration with Ronald Baecker, Caroline Haythornthwaite, Marilyn Mantei, Gale Moore, and Janet Salaff. This effort in the early 1990s was done before the advent of the
Internet, to use networked PCs for
videoconferencing and computer supported collaborative work (
CSCW).
Caroline Haythornthwaite (for her dissertation and other works) and Wellman analyzed why computer scientists connect with each other -- online and offline. They discovered that friendships as well as collaborative work were prime movers of connectivity at work..
Wellman and Anabel Quan-Haase also studied whether such computer-supported work teams were supporting networked organizations, in which bureaucratic structure and physical proximity didn't matter. Their research in one high-tech American organization -- heavily dependent on
instant messaging and
e-mail -- showed that the supposed ICT-driven transformation of work to
networked organizations was only partially fulfilled in practice. The organizational constraints of departmental organization (including power) and physical proximity continued to play important roles. There were strong norms in the organization for when different communication media were used, with face-to-face contact intertwined with online contact.
Community Networks and ICTs
As a community sociologist, Wellman began arguing that too much analysis of life online was happening in isolation from other aspects of everyday life. He published several papers (alone and with associates) arguing the need to contextualize Internet research, and proposing that online relations -- like off-line -- would be best studied as ramified social networks rather than as bounded groups. This argument culminated in a 2002 book,
The Internet in Everyday Life (co-edited with Caroline Haythornthwaite), providing exemplification from studies in a number of social milieus.
Wellman did empirical work in this area: he was part of a team (led by James Witte) that surveyed visitors to the
National Geographic Society's website in 1998 and used these data to counter the
dystopian argument that Internet involvement was associated with
social isolation.
The large U.S. national random-sample survey analyzed in the Pew Internet report, "The Strength of Weak Ties" (with Jeffrey Boase, John Hannigan and Lee Rainie) also showed a positive association between communication online and communication by telephone and face-to-face. The study showed that email is well-suited for maintaining regular contact with large networks, and especially with relationships that are only somewhat strong. The study also found that Internet users get more help than non-users from friends and relatives.
Research into the "
glocalization" concept also fed into this intellectual stream.
Keith Hampton and Wellman studied the
Toronto suburb of "Netville", a pseudonym. It showed the interplay between online and offline activity, and how the Internet -- aided by a list-serve -- isn't just a means of long-distance communication but enhances neighboring and civic involvement.
Wellman's current work continues to focus on the interplay between information and communication technologies, especially the
Internet,
social relations and
social structure. He is collaborating with Helen Hua Wang and
Jeffrey Cole of the
World Internet Project's Center for the Digital Future to investigate the first national U.S. survey of social relationships and Internet use. He is also collaborating with Ben Veenhof (
Statistics Canada), Carsten Quell (
Department of Canadian Heritage) and Bernie Hogan to relate time spent at home on the Internet to social relations and civic involvement. A different focus is his collaboration on Wenhong Chen's study of transnational immigrant entrepreneurs who link
China and North America.
Wellman's major current focus is as the head of the
Connected Lives project studying the interplay between communication, community and domestic relationships in Toronto and in
Chapleau in rural northern Ontario. Early findings of the interplay between online and offline life are summarized in "Connected Lives: The Project". More focused research (with Jennifer Kayahara) has shown how the onetime
two-step flow of communication has become more recursively multi-step as the result of the
Internet's facilitation of information seeking and communication.. Recent research (with Tracy Kennedy) has argued that many households, like communities, have changed from local groups to become spatially-dispersed networks connected by frequent ICT and mobile phone communication. Other NetLab researchers, besides those noted in the text and the notes, include Dean Behrens and Barbara Neves.
Teaching and Mentoring
Wellman mentors graduate and undergraduate students in courses about community, social network analysis, and technology and society. He has co-authored with 51 students, including five undergraduates and one high school student. In 1998, he received the annual "Mentoring Award" from the International Network for Personal Relationships.
Offices
Founded and led the University of Toronto's "Structural Analysis Programme" in the Department of Sociology, 1979-1982, which focused on studying social structure and relationships from a social network perspective. The Department of Sociology subsequently established the "Barry Wellman Award" for excellence in undergraduate research.
Associate Director of the Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto (1980-1984), where his research was based, 1970-2007.
Council member and then President of two sections of the American Sociological Association: » * Community and Urban Sociology (1998-2000): led the team that founded the journal, City and Community;
* Communications and Information Technologies (2005-2006): membership increased from 95 to 303.
Elected to the Council (2000) and then became President of the Sociological Research Association honor society (2004-2005).
North American editor of Information, Communication and Society (2003-).
Publications
Wellman is the editor of three books, and the author of more than 200 articles. His Erdős number is 3.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Barry Wellman'.
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