NETWORK ANALYSIS AND SOCIAL DYNAMICS

Douglas R White

doi:10.1080/01969720490426858

Abstract

Network analysis, an area of mathematical anthropology and sociology crucial to the linking of theory and observation, developed dramatically in recent decades. This made possible a new understanding of social dynamics as a synthesis of network theories. Concrete links can be identified between the actions of self-reflective agents, with rich information processing and decision processes deeply embedded in social worlds, and emergence or change in the self-restructuring systems they operate—including the emergence of organizations, groups, institutions, norms, and cultures.

Highlights

Network analysis, an area of mathematical anthropology and sociology crucial to the linking of theory and observation, developed dramatically in recent decades
Concrete links can be identified between the actions of self-reflective agents, with rich information processing and decision processes deeply embedded in social worlds, and emergence or change in the self-restructuring systems they operate — including the emergence of organizations, groups, institutions, norms, and cultures
The effort that anthropologists have put into long-term field sites has begun to pay off in terms of longitudinal network studies of the dynamics of social networks

Summary

NETWORK ANALYSIS AND SOCIAL DYNAMICS

An area of mathematical anthropology and sociology crucial to the linking of theory and observation, developed dramatically in recent decades This made possible a new understanding of social dynamics as a synthesis of network theories. The rich ethnographic context that long-term field site data bring to network analysis has begun to contribute in major ways to foundational theory in the social sciences. Studies in this context have begun to integrate, in an emergent network theory, ‘‘models of how complex, information processing, self-reflective, self-restructuring systems operate, develop and change’’ (Read 1990). I will focus here on applications used to date for several long-term, field site analyses.

CONCEPTUAL PERSPECTIVE

STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS

Conditional homomorphism

Dynamical Evolution of Coherence among Formal Patterns

Allocated positions

SOME RESEARCH PROBLEMS