Unequal Reach: Cyclical and Amplifying Ties Among Agricultural and Oilfield Workers in Texas
基于对德克萨斯州农业和油田工人的60次访谈，研究发现两类工人在远离家乡的野外共同生活时都形成了类似亲属的强纽带，但油田工人利用这些纽带在行业间流动和晋升（放大性纽带），而农业工人则仅用于季节性生存（循环性纽带），揭示了行业结构如何影响社会网络的实际效用。
What kinds of ties do agricultural and oil and gas workers form in the field, and how do they use them later on? Why do they use them differently? Scholarship highlights how weak ties can link people to valuable information, while strong ties can be critical for day-to-day survival. Yet many mechanisms affect how workers form and use social networks over time and space. Drawing on 60 interviews and observations with agricultural and oilfield workers in Texas, I examine how both groups form strong ties of fictive kinship when living together in the field far from home—pooling resources, sharing reproductive labor, and using the discourse of family to describe these relationships. Then I examine how they use these ties very differently later in practice. Oilfield workers often use their fictive kin ties to move up and around the industry across space, time, and companies: amplifying ties. In contrast, agricultural workers renew the same strong ties for survival from season to season, maintaining cyclical ties. The comparison highlights how industry mobility ladders, tempos, and geographies affect how workers can use their networks in practice. While both agricultural and oilfield workers become fictive kin in situations of intense proximity, structural differences give their networks unequal reach.