Flows: A Network Approach to Social Inequality

In Flows: A Network Approach to Social Inequality, sociologist Lorne Tepperman of the University of Toronto and co-author Sally Chiang propose an exciting new way of looking at the social world. Society, they suggest, is an enormously complicated, interrelated system of flows – flows of information, flows of people, and flows of capital, to name just a few. Through processes like diffusion and migration, manifested in everyday life through such phenomena as gossip, the formation of cliques, and the movement of people from one country to another, flows reshape the world we live in, determining its shape and future. The authors examine what social scientists have learned about flows, drawing on research not only from sociology but from related fields such as psychology, medicine, and management. In particular, they focus on what the study of flows reveals about the age-old problem of human inequality: why it exists and why it persists. Flows do more than reshape the world. They shape our individual futures, too. By understanding flows, we are better able to understand not only how the world works, but how we might make it a better place, both for ourselves and others.