Flows

"In 'Flows : a network approach to social inequality,' authors Lorne Tepperman and Sally Chiang propose an exciting new way of looking at the social world. Society, the authors 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 among and within nations, 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." --