Engaging with Social Networks: The Bourdieu-Becker Encounter Revisited

Economic implications of social networks are of great importance and economic motives may well play crucial roles in network formation and dissipation. Although historically speaking the mainstream economics' attention to the subject had rather been limited, in the previous couple of decades, the economics discipline developed its own branch of social network analysis and incorporated in their analysis individuals' networking decisions based on a standard Beckerian cost-benefit calculus. In understanding the scope of this new branch in economics discipline to incorporate social dimensions of the economy, this article aims to bring a Bourdieusian critique toward this approach, given that Bourdieu had been critical to a Beckerian cost-benefit reductionism in decision-making and had himself developed his own approach to social relations.