This book by Gabriel Kessler and Juan Ignacio Piovani, two of Argentina’s most established sociologists working on social structure, inequality and living conditions, offers something rarely found in academic research on contemporary Argentina: a systematic, nationwide map of its inhabitants’ everyday social relations. The book is based on the National Survey of Social Relations (Encuesta Nacional sobre Relaciones Sociales, ENRS), conducted as part of the Research Programme on Contemporary Argentine Society (Programa de Investigación sobre la Sociedad Argentina Contemporánea, Pisac). It draws on a sample of 4,480 cases across 184 census tracts in 93 localities, grouped into 57 urban agglomerations. The survey covers seven regions of the country and, unusually for a study of this kind, includes localities with populations as small as 2,000. Fieldwork concluded in March 2020, at the very threshold of the COVID-19 pandemic – a fact worth bearing in mind when reading the book, as discussed below.
The volume continues a line of research initiated by Piovani himself, together with Agustín Salvia, in Argentina in the Twenty-First Century (2018), which was based on the National Survey of Social Structure (Encuesta Nacional sobre la Estructura Social, ENES). It shifts the focus, however, from stratification, living conditions and the labour market towards a subject less frequently addressed by Argentine structural sociology: personal relationships; exchanges of assistance, care and money; sociability within couples and friendships; and institutional and claim-making participation. In this respect, it engages with a tradition of research on personal networks and social capital, where Bourdieu, Coleman, Granovetter and Lin are the principal theoretical references, as well as with local studies more limited in their geographical and thematic scope, including those by Kessler and Espinoza, De Grande, and Boniolo, Dalle and Elbert. For readers familiar with Latin American scholarship on exchange networks among popular sectors (e.g., Larissa Lomnitz’s classic study of reciprocal networks in a low-income neighbourhood in Mexico), this book represents a large-scale updating of those questions, now extended across the entire class structure and the whole of urban Argentina.
The book is deliberately organised as a progression across scales, which the authors describe as a movement ‘from the individual to society’. The first chapter examines the ‘close social environment’ (CSE): the set of most significant relationships with people outside the household, including relatives, friends and neighbours. The authors prefer this expression to the more familiar term ‘personal network’, because not all close relationships form structured or interconnected networks. This chapter introduces one of the book’s most original analytical contributions: a typology of CSEs that combines the type of relationship with the form taken by the tie (affective, instrumental or ‘multipléxico’, multiplex) and an index of isomorphism measuring the degree of similarity between individuals and their social environments in terms of gender, class and educational level. The central finding is that most of the Argentine population has CSEs that are hybrid, multiplex and mixed in composition. As socioeconomic and educational levels increase, however, these environments become more centred on friendships and instrumental exchanges, whereas family and neighbourhood ties, more oriented towards subsistence, predominate among popular sectors. Status homophily, the authors argue, actively contributes to the reproduction of class inequalities.
The second chapter considers social capital, understood in Bourdieusian terms as the networks of relationships through which material and symbolic resources can be accessed. It develops two original typologies, one based on the type of relationship and the other on what circulates through it, together with a particularly suggestive measure: the ‘golden social capital’ index, which gauges access to contacts capable of facilitating scarce or costly goods and services, such as medical treatment, legal assistance or employment opportunities. One finding likely to be of particular interest to inequality scholars is that social and economic capital generally go hand in hand, although there are significant exceptions. Women from popular sectors manage to mobilise community- and neighbourhood-based social capital under adverse conditions, while ‘golden capital’ is paradoxically more accessible in medium-sized cities than in major metropolitan areas, because the social distance between local elites and the remainder of the population is smaller.
The third chapter, devoted to couples and friendships, is probably the most ethnographically engaging. It finds that 56 per cent of respondents have a partner, with strong educational and status homogamy. It also documents a historical shift from ‘endogamy’ (couples who share pre-existing networks based on neighbourhood, family or religious institutions) towards ‘homogamy’ without shared networks: couples who meet at work, university or online, but who nevertheless tend to resemble one another in their trajectories and values. The chapter also examines interpersonal conflict, which is more frequent with partners and relatives among women, and with friends and colleagues among men. It identifies social barriers to friendship concentrated around value-based cleavages, including abortion, the most recent military dictatorship and capital punishment, rather than around declared socioeconomic status. The authors themselves acknowledge, with methodological candour, that these responses may be affected by social desirability bias.
The fourth chapter examines institutional affiliation, participation without formal membership, such as informal volunteering, economic collaboration, digital inclusion and claim-making action. Here the book presents one of its most provocative findings. Contrary to much of the literature on social mobilisation, which associates claim-making activity with popular sectors, the ENRS data show that participation in protests and other forms of collective demand-making increases with socioeconomic and educational level. The chapter also rejects the hypothesis that digital participation substitutes for face-to-face involvement: instead, the two forms of engagement reinforce one another.
The book concludes with a chapter synthesising its findings through the lens of the reproduction of inequality, followed by an appendix containing ‘maps of interregional contrasts’ comparing the relational profiles of the country’s seven regions. Here, the authors venture some evocative comparisons. The Central-Pampas corridor, with its network of interconnected medium-sized cities, resembles, they suggest, urban configurations found in northern Italy, parts of Germany and southern or south-eastern Brazil. Greater Buenos Aires, by contrast, displays a ‘plebeian’ structure, fragmented into multiple neighbourhood centres with little connection among them. This is the result of a radial-concentric transport network linking each peripheral area to the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, but not to one another. The Autonomous City of Buenos Aires itself emerges as the distinctive case of a ‘society of friends’, in which the shift towards elective relationships does not, unlike in other societies, produce greater loneliness, but rather a dense sociability based on friendship, although one that remains highly stratified.
The book’s principal strengths are evident. First, the scale and geographical coverage of the ENRS, which includes small localities rarely captured by Argentine social research, make it possible to overcome the metropolitan bias that commonly characterises such studies and to provide, for the first time, a systematic picture of the country’s regional heterogeneity in the realm of social relations. Second, the conceptual apparatus developed throughout the book (the typologies of CSEs, the isomorphism index, the typologies of social capital, the golden social capital index and the claim-making action index) constitutes an original methodological contribution. Documented rigorously in the footnotes, these tools are likely to be taken up by future research on the region. Third, the book succeeds in combining accessible prose, including summary boxes at the end of each chapter designed for non-specialist readers, with a consistent analytical argument about how the fabric of everyday social relationships, far from operating as a social equaliser, functions as an additional and somewhat less visible mechanism through which inequalities of class, gender and stage of life are reproduced.
Taken as a whole, Una sociología de la vida en común (A Sociology of Life in Common) is a significant contribution to the study of social structure, personal networks and inequality in Argentina, as well as a work of broader relevance to the Latin American sociology of everyday life, friendship, social capital and civic participation. Its combination of national scope, conceptual originality and accessible prose makes it an essential reference both for specialists in inequality and social networks and for general readers seeking to understand, through systematic evidence, how the relationships that sustain and stratify Argentines’ life in common are actually woven together.
