Omar Lizardo
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Notre Dame
Working Papers
Taste and the Logic of Practice in Distinction [pdf]
Weighted reciprocity in human communication networks
In this paper we define a metric for reciprocity---the degree of balance in a social relationship---appropriate for weighted social networks in order to investigate the distribution of this dyadic feature in a large-scale system built from trace-logs of over a billion cell-phone communication events across millions of actors. We find that dyadic relations in this network are characterized by much larger degrees of imbalance than we would expect if persons kept only those relationships that exhibited close to full reciprocity. We point to two structural features of human communication behavior and relationship formation---the division of contacts into strong and weak ties and the tendency to form relationships with similar others---that either help or hinder the ability of persons to obtain communicative balance in their relationships. We examine the extent to which deviations from reciprocity in the observed network are partially traceable to these characteristics. [pdf]
Variety in cultural choice and the instrumental use of social ties
Building on the general connection between culture consumption and sociability which has been the focus of recent research in the sociology of culture, I propose that persons who have a propensity to consume a wide variety of cultural goods should also be observed to have successfully mobilized network ties for instrumental purposes, especially "weak ties" in contrast to "strong ties." The results show that net of other individual predictors, as the cultural variety of the person's repertoire of tastes increases, there is 1) a higher likelihood of having activated a social tie to obtain information about jobs, and 2) a higher likelihood that the tie activation is through a weak, rather than strong ties or non-relational mechanisms. [pdf]
Beyond 'world images': Belief as embodied action in the world
In this paper we argue the dominant strands of contemporary social and cultural theory rely on a misleading model of belief formation and a misguided conception of what beliefs are, how and in what format they are embodied and how and under what circumstances they are accessed by the social agent in naturally occurring situations. This has led cultural sociologists to mischaracterize the key phenomena of interest to a "sociology of belief." We argue that the contemporary theory of belief, in conceptualizing belief as primarily representational, propositional and as a tool for the production of inferences, and in conceptualizing action as the end-point of a chain of logical implications, provides an impoverished picture of how belief enters into the production of action. Drawing on practice theory, we suggest that---in direct contradiction to the classical conceptualization of belief---persons can form pre-theoretical, pre-conceptual beliefs about the world, and that they can reason and form expectations about the world at this pre-reflexive level. We review recent theoretical developments in studies of infant development that depart from dynamic systems theory and show that their results converge nicely with, and provide micro-models for, various phenomena (such as hysteresis) that should be at the centerpiece of any sociology theory of belief. [pdf]