This commentary provides a synthetic overview and analytic framework for understanding the papers in this volume of The ANNALS, which focuses on sharing networks in a comparative context. Economic crises endemic to capitalist societies generate the need for support networks, while welfare state configurations influence their importance as an additional survival tool. Social norms set the stage for the degrees of reciprocity and durable obligation that networks engender and the boundary conditions that enable or disable the most vulnerable members of the social hierarchy to tap the resources of more privileged contacts.
SmallMario. 2010. Unanticipated gains: Origins of network inequality in everyday life. London: Oxford University Press.
14.
SmithRobert. 2005. Mexican New York: Transnational lives of new immigrants. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
15.
SmithSandra. 2010. Lone pursuit: Distrust and defensive individualism among the black poor. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
16.
StackCarol. 1983. All our kin: Strategies for survival in a black community. New York, NY: Basic Books.
17.
WilsonWilliam Julius. 2012. The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. 2nd ed.Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
