TY - JOUR AU - Tweet, Patricia AB - 488–Work, Organizations, and Markets mal relations being the way things actually Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to “get done” (pp. 3–7). Brokers bridge the Social Capital, by Ronald S. Burt. New York, holes between clusters of informal relations. NY: Oxford University Press, 2005. 296 pp. Closure, on the other hand, is a property of $29.95 cloth. ISBN: 0199249148. the group rather than individual agents: “Clo- sure increases the odds of a person being PATRICIA TWEET caught and punished for displaying belief or SUNY Brockport behavior inconsistent with preferences in the ptweet@brockport.edu closed network .|.|.|. Closure reinforces the status quo” (p. 7). Like Manuel Castells’s Researchers concerned with civic develop- (1996) “network society” based on innova- ment are familiar with the term “social capi- tions in information technology, Burt be- tal” from the work of Robert Putnam (2000). lieves a sea change is occurring socially, dri- According to Putnam, Americans are “bowl- ven by the recent magnification of communi- ing alone” because of a society-wide deficit cations capability. Burt proposes that, today, in civic involvement. In his latest book, people live in “a world where reputation re- Ronald S. Burt, a student of organizational places authority, pursued opportunity re- behavior TI - Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital JF - Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews DO - 10.1177/009430610603500523 DA - 2006-09-01 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/sage/brokerage-and-closure-an-introduction-to-social-capital-O03Ke9ItoO SP - 488 EP - 489 VL - 35 IS - 5 DP - DeepDyve ER -