894 Reading notes: SNA

Pioneers of Social Network Analysis

A social network diagram displaying friendship ties among a set of Facebook users

By Kencf0618, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

The historical background of Social Network Analysis (SNA) is interesting, and Scott’s (2010) account is mostly clear. Unfortunately, however, Scott gets ahead of himself and backtracks at times, so note-taking can be a challenge.  Because he is less than systematic with sticking to his chronology, it also difficult to nail down exactly who did what.  At any rate, the main story appears to be as follows.

Harvard researchers of 1930s began exploring group behavior, particularly in work settings such as factories. They used sociograms to visualize these relationships.  These researchers also discovered the importance of “cliques,” small, non-kinship groupings that are personal and informal.  They discovered that it was productive to diagram and examine these social sub-groups using matrices and beginning to think of them in terms of networks.  They also looked at the relationships between members of cliques, noting the centrality or peripherality of members.  Radcliffe-Brown was one of the key theorists in this early work. In the later 1940s, Homans, another Harvard sociologist, began to synthesize early network approaches, as up to this point theorists with similar methods had not combined their efforts.  Using his synthesized framework, he reinterpreted earlier studies.

Manchester University anthropologists who were looking at tribal and village societies were influenced by Harvard’s Radcliffe-Brown.  But, according to Scott, “they sought to develop his ideas in a novel direction.  Instead of emphasizing integration and cohesion, they emphasized conflict and change” (p. 26).  A key figure was Max Gluckman who looked at African tribal societies in terms of how power operated to maintain stable structures or generate change. In the 1950s, John Barnes took the idea of social network as more than a metaphorical concept and tried to apply it in “a more rigorous and analytical way” (p. 27).  At this point, other scholars began to turn to mathematics and graph theory to develop more rigorous analyses.  Bot, a Canadian researcher studying in the UK, discovered the salience of network ideas and applied them to a study of relations between relatives, friends and neighbors in Britain.  She discovered Barnes’ research and the resulting synergy led to “a major theoretical innovation in British social anthropology” able to “consolidate their advances with further lessons from the American researchers” (p. 29).  Another of these Manchester researchers, Mitchell, was largely responsible for bringing in mathematical approaches, and he also emphasized the internal complexities of network relations, for example, those that involve “a transaction or exchange” (p. 31).  Thus, we began to see the idea of flow within networks. He also looked at the durability and strength of relationships within the network.  A weakness of the British model, however, was to see network models as limited to interpersonal relations and not applicable to general areas of sociology.

It was in the 1960s and 1970s at Harvard where social network analysis really took off.  Here, too, researchers had tinkered with mathematical approaches and now this approach was taken further.  By using SNA to look beyond community settings, they were able to demonstrate its relevance in a more general way.  One important early study, for example, looked at how people learn about job opportunities.

An interesting thing to note in this narrative was how many of the figures “discovered” ideas about network relations and network concepts without realizing that someone else had done, or was doing something similar.  Yes, some of them discovered each other with resulting breakthroughs and theoretical synergy, but it was common for people to apply models in various ways before linking up with what others were doing.  I guess it means that when there are productive connections to be made (note the pun), more than one brain will get there.

Interestingly, people in different fields are still “discovering” that network approaches fit their research interests.  I came across a TED Talk by Nikolas Christakis, a Chicago physician and sociologist who discovered that social network analysis showed interesting effects in the spread of medical conditions such as obesity. He discovered the relevance of the network of social relations in a particular aha moment in an early study and became obsessed with the analysis of social networks and their effects on behavior.

Networked: Some musings

Screenshot from La Paz, Latino community advocacy organization in Chattanooga (click for site)

The main claim that Rainie & Wellman (2012) advance in Networked is that social networks are changing with changing social structures and a more technologized society, but they are not disappearing.  In other words, we are seeing traditional community linkages organized around one’s neighborhood or church affiliation being replaced with linkages that may be more ad hoc and less tightly knit but still able to perform many of the social roles that human beings crave.  The resulting model the authors call “networked individualism.” However, “networked individualism is both socially liberating and socially taxing” (p. 9).  It offers great flexibility but demands time and skill spent in seeking and maintaining connections.  Furthermore, people place even more value on some personal, face-to-face interactions to complement their digital lives and selves.  Digital technologies extend social networks and allow more efficient sharing of information.
This reading makes me think of a research study that I would like to do someday.  A few years ago I spent a day volunteering with a community organization that advocates for the Latino community in Chattanooga.  A significant portion of the community are immigrants from Guatemala, and for this event, the Guatemalan Consulate from Atlanta had sent staffers up to help Chattanooga residents update their Guatemalan passports and register children born in the United States.  However, because many members of this community are illiterate or marginally literate, we volunteers were there to help them fill out the paperwork, even though some of us were non-native speakers of Spanish.  It was an eye-opening experience for me because I found myself working with a community that is doubly cut off from the larger English-speaking community.  First, they are linguistically distanced from the English-speaking majority.  Second, they are at least partially cut off from many Spanish language resources that require literacy that they do not have.  From time to time during my PhD program, I have thought about how interesting it would be to do a study of this community in terms of how they are rhetorically connected. For example, how do they find out that the consulate staffers are coming if they don’t read posters or emails?  Are there announcements on Spanish radio? I am sure there is also word-of-mouth, but where or how do they make these conversational connections? How do they know each other? What role do cell phones play? What are the centers of their community?  How do they share information?  What role do their literate children play—especially since these children are acquiring literacy in a language that does not target this community?  Rainie & Wellman focus on  networked people in the developed world, but I can’t help thinking of communities like this one that occupy many of the same physical communities that we inhabit but have very different patterns of networking and social interaction.

Inspired by Ch. 4: The Mobile Revolution

Reading Deluze & Guattari: Musings on French scholarship

Impressions of Deleuze & Guattari

Photo shot in Collegedale, TN, 2013

Interestingly enough I borrowed Deleuze & Guttari (1987) from a colleague after hearing Theories of Network students talk about rhizomes while I was taking Phelps’ class.  I didn’t yet know that I was going to take the class.  Because the writing style was so surreal, though weirdly not in the totally annoying way that the hypertext people were—or was I biased to like Deleuze & Guattari so I overlooked the fact that it is hard to get traction in this text?  At any rate, after reading Barthes, Cixous, Foucault, and Guattari (Three Ecologies), and Latour, I have begun to wonder about style in French scholarly writing and disciplinarity in French academia.  As far as the former, I don’t mean that these scholars have similar styles because they don’t.  They do, however, seem to have styles that feel less tethered, more sweeping, less step-by-step systematic compared with Anglo-American scholarship.  As far as disciplinarity, I keep finding French scholars who are very hard to pin down in terms of discipline.  Is Foucault a historian, a philosopher, a discourse theorist, a social scientist…?  Are Deleuze and Guattari psychiatrists, literary theorists, social theorists, philosophers…? I suppose the answer is yes. All of the above.  Latour is an anthropologist and a sociologist.  Castells, coming from the French tradition, is a sociologist and a communications scholar.  But British or American scholars don’t seem to have the same range, though they do, at times, changes departments or fields.  My functional linguistics professor in my MA program at UT Arlington, Susan Herring, now does computer-mediated discourse analysis as a professor of information science at Indiana University Bloomington.  Still, arguably that is not a big change.  So what is it with the French scholars?  Does it have to do with university administration or with tracking within the educational system or something else?  Or maybe I need to think of a few American or British scholars who range broadly.  W.J.T Mitchell?  Gunther Kress? Donna Haraway? Gregory Bateson?

References

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rainie, L., & Wellman, B. S. (2012). Networked: The new social operating system. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

Scott, J. (2010). Social network analysis: A handbook. Los Angeles, Calif: Sage.