Mario L. Small has made numerous contributions to research on urban neighborhoods, personal networks, qualitative and mixed methods, and other topics. He has shown that poor neighborhoods in commonly-studied cities such as Chicago are not representative of ghettos everywhere, that how people conceive of their neighborhood shapes how its conditions affect them, and that local organizations in poor neighborhoods often broker connections to both people and organizations. Small has demonstrated that people's social capital—including how many people they know and how much they trust others—depends on the organizations in which they are embedded. His work on methods has shown that many practices used to make qualitative research more scientific are ineffective. Small's most recent book examines why people are consistently willing to confide their deepest worries to people they are not close to, and proposes an approach to network analysis that begins with what people do in practice.
Small, the only two-time recipient of the C. Wright Mills Best Book Award, has received numerous awards for each of his books, including the Robert Park Best Book Award, the James Coleman Best Book Award, a PROSE Award Honorable Mention in Sociology and Anthropology, a Choice Outstanding Academic Title designation, and many others. His articles have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, American Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, Social Networks, Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, and Social Science Research, among other journals; his work has been featured by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Public Radio International, the Huffington Post, Pacific Standard, Greater Good, the Chronicle Review, Commonwealth, and Spotlight on Poverty, among other outlets.
Small has served as Associate Editor of the American Journal of Sociology, Advisory Editor of Social Problems and Sociological Quarterly, Editorial Committee Member of the Annual Review of Sociology, and Editorial Board Member of Social Psychology Quarterly and Sociological Forum. He is currently Deputy Editor of Sociological Science and Editorial Board Member of Social Science Quarterly. He has served as Council Member of the American Sociological Association, and chaired the ASA’s report on the 2010 National Research Council Assessment of Doctoral Programs. He is an Elected Member of the Sociological Research Association.
At the University of Chicago, as Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences, Small spearheaded initiatives that increased support for students, generated new resources for faculty research, seeded programs in urban and in computational social science, empirically assessed the institutional climate for students and for faculty of all backgrounds, and substantially expanded the Division’s reserves. He has been a trustee of the National Opinion Research Center and the University of Chicago Charter School, and a board member of the Spencer Foundation. He is currently on the board of the Russell Sage Foundation. Small has advised practitioners and policy makers in the private sector, in the administrations of several major cities, and in the U.S. Congress; served as expert panelist to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation (U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services); and testified on social capital and inequality before the U.S. Senate.
Born and raised in Cerro Viento, PTY, Small received a B.A. in 1996 from Carleton College, and an M.A. in 1998 and a Ph.D. in 2001 from Harvard University.
- Featured Work
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How Networks Matter in Practice
Someone To Talk To examines how people use their networks to cope with loss, victimization, failure, and other debilitating stressors. An important part of this process is deciding whom to turn to for support, and both network analysis and common sense would suggest that people will turn to their strong ties, their close friends and family.
Someone To Talk To probes this idea based on repeated in-depth interviews with graduate students coping with stress, self-doubt, failure, health problems, and poverty. Shifting attention from what people say about themselves to what they have actually done, Small finds that people are far more likely to confide in weak ties than typically believed. And they are more reticent about turning to strong ones than network theory has suggested. Testing his propositions on nationally representative surveys of adult Americans of all ages and demographic backgrounds, and on case studies of people as varied as doctors in hospitals, teachers in schools, and soldiers at war, Small finds substantial evidence contrary to the common sense about how people confide in others. Intimacy, trust, and social isolation are complex phenomena that operate in often counter-intuitive ways.
While today it is possible to study people’s networks using enormous datasets and extraordinary computational tools, some questions require, instead, studying people as individuals and delving deep into their personal motivations. A substantive, theoretical, and methodological intervention, Someone To Talk To is an inquiry into human nature, a critique of network analysis, and a discourse on the role of qualitative research in the big-data era
Perspectives from the Field
Social support networks can provide much-needed emotional, material, and financial help for people living in poverty, yet little is known about how social capital is created and augmented within such networks. Further, these networks can be eroded by sustained poverty, increasing the social exclusion and isolation that poor people already experience in other sectors of their lives.
In the May 2020 volume of The ANNALS, special editors Miranda J. Lubbers, Hugo Valenzuela García, and Mario Luis Small assemble an international group of scholars to examine the role of social networks in the day-to-day subsistence of families and individuals suffering economic hardship and analyze the many, highly complex ways in which networks are related to poverty. The volume presents studies that explore social ties and sharing networks, the organizations that foster them, the conditions that shape them or undermine them, and the ways in which networks are limited when their participants are under continuous or extreme economic pressure. Drawing upon new, fieldwork-based evidence, the volume suggests policies to strengthen and mobilize both the social support networks of vulnerable populations and the welfare systems on which the poor depend.
Origins of Network Inequality in Everday Life
Social capital theorists have shown that some people do better than others in part because they enjoy larger, more supportive, or otherwise more useful networks. But why do some people have better networks than others?
Unanticipated Gains argues that the answer lies less in people's deliberate "networking" than in the institutional conditions of the churches, colleges, firms, gyms, childcare centers, schools, and other organizations in which they happen to participate routinely. The book illustrates and develops this argument by exploring the experiences of New York City mothers whose children were enrolled in childcare centers.
Unanticipated Gains examines why scores of these mothers, after enrolling their children in centers, dramatically expanded both the size and usefulness of their personal networks, often in ways they did not expect. Whether, how, and how much the mothers' networks were altered---and how useful these networks were---depended on the apparently trivial but remarkably consequential practices and regulations of the centers, from the structure of their PTOs, to the regularity of their fieldtrips to amusement parks and zoos, to their ostensibly innocuous rules regarding pick-up and drop-off times.
Relying on scores of in-depth interviews with mothers, quantitative data on both mothers and centers, and detailed case studies of other routine organizations (from beauty salons and bath houses to colleges and churches), Unanticipated Gains shows that how much people gain from their connections depends substantially on institutional conditions they often do not control, and through everyday process they may not even be aware of.
The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio
Villa Victoria examines how of a group of low-income Puerto Rican migrants with little formal education living in a Boston enclave resisted the efforts of the city to relocate them in the name of "urban renewal." After a successful grassroots movement, the group earned the right to become developers of the parcel of land, creating, instead of a slew of luxury condominiums, a new mixed-income community of townhouses and public gathering areas, a community they named "Villa Victoria." Examining what happened next, and why, becomes an occasion to study the consequences of concentrated poverty and the sustainability of social capital.
Villa Victoria explains why social relations in this housing complex did not follow the expectations of standard sociological theories about the effects of concentrated poverty. The answer lies less in the neighborhood than in the theories, which do not consider how much the effects of neighborhood poverty depend on the conditions of the given neighborhood and of the city in which it is located.
The Roles of Systems, Institutions, and Organizations
Villa Victoria examines how of a group of low-income Puerto Rican migrants with little formal education living in a Boston enclave resisted the efforts of the city to relocate them in the name of "urban renewal." After a successful grassroots movement, the group earned the right to become developers of the parcel of land, creating, instead of a slew of luxury condominiums, a new mixed-income community of townhouses and public gathering areas, a community they named "Villa Victoria." Examining what happened next, and why, becomes an occasion to study the consequences of concentrated poverty and the sustainability of social capital.
Villa Victoria explains why social relations in this housing complex did not follow the expectations of standard sociological theories about the effects of concentrated poverty. The answer lies less in the neighborhood than in the theories, which do not consider how much the effects of neighborhood poverty depend on the conditions of the given neighborhood and of the city in which it is located.
Culture has returned to the poverty research agenda. Over the past decade, sociologists, demographers, and even economists have begun asking questions about the role of culture in many aspects of poverty, at times even explaining the behavior of low-income populations in reference to cultural factors. Unlike their predecessors, contemporary researchers rarely claim that culture will sustain itself for multiple generations regardless of structural changes, and they almost never use the term pathology, which implied in an earlier era that people would cease to be poor if they changed their culture. The new generation of scholars conceives of culture in substantially different ways.
By considering poverty in the United States and abroad, examining both the elite, policy-making level and the daily lives of low-income people themselves, the articles convey a composite and multileveled picture of the ways in which meaning-making factors into the production and reproduction of poverty. The volume aims to demonstrate the importance of cultural concepts for poverty research, serve as a model and a resource for poverty scholars who wish to incorporate cultural concepts into their research, assist in the training of future scholars working at the nexus of poverty and culture, and identify crucial areas for future methodological, theoretical, and empirical development. The volume also serves to debunk existing myths about the cultural orientations of the poor for those formulating policy; as the editors point out, “ignoring culture can lead to bad policy.”
- Awards & Honors
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Elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.
Elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2020 for his contributions to the advancement of the social sciences.
Selected for the University of Bremen Excellence Chair, 2020–2023.
Received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from Harvard University in 2020.
Winner of the 2018 Best Publication Award from the Sociology of Mental Health Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) for Someone To Talk To (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Awarded Honorable Mention for the 2018 PROSE Award in the Cultural Anthropology and Sociology Category from the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for Someone To Talk To (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Winner of the 2018 Outstanding Recent Contribution Award from the Social Psychology Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) for Someone To Talk To (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Winner of the 2018 James Coleman Award for Outstanding Book or Article from the Rationality and Society Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) for Someone To Talk To (Oxford University Press, 2017).
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