Social network analysis of historical communities: Some questions from the present for the past

Abstract

The essay suggests to historians the usefulness of using a social network analytic approach to studying communities and community-like social structures such as kinship groups and work groups. Historians have long employed social network as a metaphor, but few have embraced the substance, theory, or methods of the social network paradigm. In the 1970s and 1980s, historians and other social scientists on both sides of the Atlantic revisited questions about the nature of family and community life, and, searching for connectivity, laid the groundwork for a social network approach to the study of community. The community question itself evolved as sociologists changed their ideas about what constituted community and where to find it. Researchers were no longer restricted to searching for community in the solidarities of neighborhoods and kinship groups. Instead they studied all active community-like relationships, no matter where located. As a result, analysts were able to show that community had not been “lost” under the impact of contemporary societal transformations nor “saved” in village-like neighborhoods. Rather, people formed far-flung networks containing a sizeable and varied number of ties with kith and kin that supplied sociability, support, and information. These ties also provided indirect links to the people and resources of other social milieux.