Innovation in the Context of Networks, Hierarchies, and Cohesion

Abstract

Chapter 5. INNOVATION IN THE CONTEXT OF NETWORKS, HIERARCHIES, AND COHESION Douglas R. White David Lane, Geoff West, Sander van der Leeuw, and Denise Pumain, eds. A New Perspective on Innovation and Social Change. Dordrecht: Springer Methodos Series. 2007. Abstract The ability to specify models of social processes in relatively precise terms proves to be central to historical dynamics and to a macro-approach to innovation and social change as well as to micro- approaches. This chapter views innovation and social change as occurring in social networks. It is less concerned with how, or precisely what innovations occur than with when and where they occur, and, in terms of context, why. The focus on network approaches emphasizes the specification of a series of consequential concepts associated with the notions of 'cohesion' and 'hierarchy' in mathematics, the physical sciences, and the social sciences. A specification of the first of these concepts, structural cohesion, provides a basis for measuring the specific strength and nature of bonds and linkages that help to define and evaluate important group- level processes in historical and social dynamics. The second concept, that of hierarchy, is important to determine aspects of agency, but requires working through multiple sources of network measurement (multiple relations, multiple kinds of nodes and agents) in order to specify and test processual theories of social and historical dynamics linked to innovation and social change. I NTRODUCTION This chapter attempts to bridge two different worlds, that of substantive social science theory and that of formal mathematical theory. It therefore has to be read and understood from both these perspectives simultaneously. Substantively speaking, this chapter explores how diverse, multi-level, sparse or densely interconnected, complicated, and loosely or tightly integrated the structures and network processes involved in innovation may be. In order to study such intricate systems and processes, with very different forms and types and degrees of complexity, we need to reconsider and reconfigure the very basic concepts we use. That is where formal theories come in. The other goal of this chapter is to further the integration of formal theories of network dynamics with substantive theories of socio-historical dynamics, and to outline how certain types of innovation play out within these dynamics. Some readers will inevitably ask “Why make things so difficult?” The reason is that by using substantive and formal theory in tandem, we can generate bodies of data that have substantive relevance but can be coded in formal and relational terms, enabling on the one hand potentially explanatory formal theories to be substantively tested, and on the other allowing the incorporation, into substantive theory, of proofs of outcomes that follow logically from