The importance of social networks and social capital has been well established, but
our understanding of exactly how people maintain useful ties, and how those ties
operate day to day, is less advanced. In this article, I examine the networks of a
self-employed construction contractor in the Sand Mountain area of Alabama who
relies entirely on networks for job referrals. Though the core of his business comes
from people in his own and related occupations, I argue that his use of purely
social ties, maintained by extensive socializing, are also crucial, and that forms
of conversation with no obvious utility, such as gossip, are actually central to his
ability to maintain extremely large and occupationally valuable networks.
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