Access to Interorganizational Networks as a Professional Resource

Six social service delivery systems for juvenile offenders were structured as interorganizational resource networks on the assumption that this would facilitate the development of a firm community base for their activities. The access that individual practitioners had to these program networks was seen theoretically as a measure of their integration into a larger social collectivity, a conceptualization that tied the analysis to a Durkheimian view of social structure. The specific hypothesis that was tested was that a strategic network position would be associated with more extensive professional ties to important institutions and decision-making centers in the surrounding community. In four of the six programs the hypothesis was confirmed; network centrality, measured sociometrically, was in fact a better predictor of the participants' community contact and community activism than their personal attributes, the technical resources and skills they brought to their work, or the formal status and autonomy they had achieved in the agency that employed them. In one of the two remaining programs, the hypothesis was not confirmed and, in the other, a reversal was evident: individuals with central network positions were less involved in the community than those who were relatively isolated from the network. The results are offered as evidence of how social network analysis can bridge levels of inquiry and provide new ways of approaching questions derived from traditional sociological theory.