ABSTRACT
Looking back, I did not immediately discern the direction of the journey. Unlike most of my friends who strayed little from their chosen paths, I became bored travelling the same route for more than a few years. In an unpublished paper in which Ronald Burt analyzed sociologists’ citation patterns in journal articles using block modeling techniques, I was surprised to find myself placed in the political arena. I had always thought that economy and stratification were my major areas, but on reflection, I concluded that I was constantly trying to integrate social stratification and politics into a single framework. This theme first appeared in my dissertation and persisted in research on work organization, community power, natural disasters, labor unions, political ideologies, and the working class. While the theme was constant, the substantive areas changed.
