Herbert J. Gans

And when I was a, um, a graduate student, I put a lot of things together.

I was very interested also in urban sociology, and I thought about and I read about, um, the West End of Boston, great book by Herbert Gans called The Urban Villagers, and he talked about how they got organized or they didn't get organized and I realized that ...

And, and I, so I started to look at the literature on social networks, and I realized that most of those studies were about very tight-knit little villages, neighborhoods in the West End, for example.

But if you read between the lines, you could see that how those different neighborhoods got connected actually mattered a lot.

And so I did revise and sent it back, and it was accepted, which was my first accepted paper, and it appeared, as some of you may know if you have long memories, in the American Journal of Sociology in May 1973.

And I immediately started getting correspondence from all sorts of people about it, and I realized I must, uh, apparently I must actually be onto something, um, because a lot of people, uh, were very interested in this.

Herbert Gans wrote to me, other people wrote to me, people who, who I didn't think had any idea who I was.

Uh, and so that was very exciting, and that is still, uh, as I think some of you know, my most cited paper.