Network Analysis and Social Dynamics

Network analysis, an area of mathematical sociology and anthropology crucial to the linking of theory and observation, developed dramatically in recent decades. Methodological developments are recounted that make possible a theoretical synthesis of social network theory in relation to understanding of social dynamics. The past 35 years saw a massive development of tools for network analysis, spurred by anthropologist Clyde Mitchell and sociologist Harrison White, and burgeoning applications to ever-wider sets of problems in the social sciences. The trajectories of social network analysis in the two disciplines were very different, however. In anthropology, where it was introduced in the 1960s as a collateral tool to institutional and cultural analysis, the network paradigm did not become a central contributor to theory, as in sociology. Still, even in sociology, the development of methodology (Wasserman and Faust 1994) has far outstripped that of an integrated theory of networks that situates explanatory principles in a common conceptual framework, and the lack of such developments is noted in both disciplines. My discussion will focus on application of explanatory frameworks in an emergent network theory as used by research collaborators (including myself and graph theorist Frank Harary) in a 1 Unlike sociology, which defined and forged ahead with social networks as a theoretical paradigm (Mullins 1975, Berkowitz 1982, Burt 1982) on a par with "heavy-duty approaches such as structure-functionalism, Marxism, and ethnomethodology” (Wellman 2000:4), interest in networks largely died out in anthropology once those experimenting with the approach in the 1960s and early 1970s turned from problems of fluid social structure to the study of transactions, ritual enactment, symbolic action, and contemporary themes of cultural anthropology. Anthropologists with a cognitive focus narrowed their studies to the shared components of egocentric cognitive constructions in relation to observed behavior, studies that unfortunately didn’t recapture the interests of the field at large. series of long-term field sites. The aspects of the project I will discuss are integrated through a NSF grant in which I am PI and Harary is the consultant. 1 Conceptual Perspective. One of the key ingredients of scientific explanation and the testing of theory is the development of models that relate first principles (e.g., interaction, structure) to a diversity of observable outcomes (e.g., as a function of simpler parameters or measures). Network theory, in so doing, attempts to explicate how social and cultural phenomena emerge out of interaction by measuring, across observable networks of communication and of social and instrumental relations, events and activities, and ideally, through time, different kinds of emergent structure. Table 1 shows some of the network concepts applicable to domains of social theory. Coupled with the modeling of fundamental interaction processes, they are designed to allow for structural emergents to be measured and to test hypotheses about processes, interactions and outcomes.