A good way to talk. A comparative analysis of communication choices in China, Denmark and the US

The article presents a comparative analysis of how people manage ways of communicating with their social ties. It thereby makes a qualitative contribution to the social ties literature [Granovetter, 1973. The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380. doi: 10.1086/225469...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Information, communication & society communication & society, 2022-11, Vol.25 (15), p.2317-2332
Main Authors: Pagh, Jesper, Zeng Skovhøj, Fiona Huijie, Lai, Signe Sophus
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
affordance theory
Communication
communication criteria
Comparative analysis
Criteria
ethnographic fieldwork
Interviews
Qualitative analysis
Qualitative research
Social networks
social ties
Sociocultural factors
Sociology
technological afforances
Technology
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Summary:The article presents a comparative analysis of how people manage ways of communicating with their social ties. It thereby makes a qualitative contribution to the social ties literature [Granovetter, 1973. The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380. doi: 10.1086/225469 ], which is dominated by quantitative approaches. Specifically, the article maps different criteria that people consider when they combine the affordances [Hutchby, 2001. The communicative affordances of technological artefacts. In Conversation and technology, from the telephone to the Internet (pp. 13-33). Polity Press] of various types of communication in their interaction with different social ties. The qualitative analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork in China, Denmark and the US, adopting and adapting a shared interview-diary-interview method in each field site (Lai, S. S., Pagh, J., & Zeng, F. H. (2019). Tracing Communicative Patterns. Nordicom Review, 40(s1). https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2019-001.). Despite apparent sociocultural and infrastructural differences between the national contexts, we find that people, guided by universal aspects of sociality, share five criteria, namely efficiency, sensibility, ephemerality, insistency, and availability, that ground their everyday communications with both strong and weak ties.
ISSN:1369-118X
1468-4462
DOI:10.1080/1369118X.2021.1934067