Social Norms from Close-Knit Groups to Loose-Knit Groups

Abstract

In 1991, Bob Ellickson's book about ranchers who raise cattle in an isolated California county launched an important new movement in the legal academy.' Scholars in this law and social norms movement began asking a series of interesting questions about the role of informal rules governing human relations, largely in an effort to determine whether these norms provide a more efficient structure of governance than formal law. Law and social norms scholars with empirical inclinations have, for the most part, continued to study the emergence and maintenance of social norms in communities that resemble Shasta County's closeknit group.2 A close-knit group is a network in which power is broadly distributed and information pertinent to informal control circulates easily among network members.3 Typically, close-knit groups are made up of repeat players who can identify one another. More recently, legal scholars interested in social norms have begun to examine how social norms might arise and be enforced in contexts with more anonymous subjects or fewer repeat players.4 Among these non-close-knit groups, it is important to distinguish between two types. Loose-knit groups are clusters of individuals among whom in-