Formal Network Analysis Research Articles

From plan to network: Urban elites and the post‐communist organisational state in Russia

Abstract. This article uses the results from formal network analysis to test hypotheses about the character of Russia's post‐communist transition, taking decision‐making elites at the sub‐national level as the unit of analysis. From the transition literature, the hypothesis generated is that city politics retains elements of its pre‐democratic structure; from the urban regime theory, the hypothesis generated is that the elites’ structure will show elements of convergence to a Western type, with the prominence of actors from the private sector. The data is drawn from a survey of elites in one city, Novosibirsk, undertaken in 1997. The results show that the membership and structure of the network has some similar characteristics to a Western city. Rather than being purely dominated by bureaucratic elites, the private sector plays a role. The private sector actors are grouped with the public sector actors, though they are not, however, equal partners to the networks as its members do not appear among the most networked in the city. We conclude that the legacy of the past may not be as much a constraint as the transition literature supposes.

World City Networks and Hierarchies, 1977-1997

The world's great cities are important nodes in the world economy. Major theorists (Friedman, Sassen, Castells) conceptualize global cities as the command and control centers for contemporary global capitalism. The authors' research offers a view of the global system based on a careful examination of the relations and connections between world cities and how those patterns change over time. Formal network analysis allows the authors to interpret data on flows of airline passengers between the world's great cities for six time points between 1977 and 1997, focusing on the changes in network characteristics (especially centrality hierarchies and clique membership) for the entire global city system. Although New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, and a few other major European and North American metropolises dominate this urban hierarchy throughout the two decades, the network roles and positions of other places shift considerably. The article concludes that research on world city networks once again demonstrates that global urbanization patterns are characterized by the uneven development dynamic anticipated by world-system analysis.

Conceptualising and Mapping the Structure of the World System's City System

For the past 20 years, researches using the lens of world system theory (and other global political economy perspectives) have come to a better understanding of many of the anomalies in urbanisation patterns across more and less developed countries that had befuddled researchers whose assumptions left out global sources of social change. Recently this line of research has moved beyond regarding cities as mere objects of global forces, also theorising about their importance as lynchpins in the spatial organisation of the world economy. In this paper we review some of the scholarship that emphasises large cities' roles as important modes of production, consumption, exchange and control at the global level; we develop the argument that systematic tinkages—economic, cultural, political or social-retational—among global cities are likely to reveal the spatial organisation of the world-system; we review our position that formal network analysis provides a most promising methodological framework for analysing and mapping global intercity linkages; and we present a map of the current world city system based on our network analysis of recent air travel among many of the world's great cities. We point out that our analysis is very preliminary and provides only a rough chart of the world city system at one point in time, and the data requirements for more detailed world city system maps for several periods of time are imposing, to say the least. Nevertheless, such a project holds the promise of revealing much about the spatial structure of our world system, how it has changed; how it is likely to change in the future; and how cities' populations are affected by these changes. Completing the project will probably require collaboration among researchers in different countries.

Variability in cigarette smoking within and between adolescent friendship cliques.

Research has consistently shown that adolescent smoking is related to friends' smoking, yet smoking in the context of adolescent peer groups (friendship cliques) has been little studied. Formal network analysis was used to identify 87 adolescent friendship cliques in a sample of 1,092 ninth graders at five schools. There was intraclique homogeneity and interclique heterogeneity in current cigarette smoking, confirming that smokers tend to be in cliques with smokers and nonsmokers tend to be with nonsmokers. Most cliques were comprised entirely or mostly of nonsmokers, suggesting that friendship cliques may contribute more to the maintenance of nonsmoking than to the onset and maintenance of smoking. Prevention and research implications are discussed.

The Systems Approach to International Migration: An Application of Network Analysis Methods

"The objective of this article is to apply formal network analysis to the systems approach [to the study of international migration]. Network analysis will allow two of the four methodological issues to be considered. First, clique and centrality analysis methods will be used to examine the definition and development of ties within an international migration system over time. Second, quadratic assignment procedure (QAP) regression techniques will be used to address the influence of macro factors on international migration flows....[We use] the European Union as a network of migration interest...." (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA)

“Structure”/“Action” Contingencies and the Model of Parallel Distributed Processing

L'A. aborde la fonction de la structure sur l'action et le phenomene de reproduction et de reformation de la structure par les agregats d'action. Son etude du couple « structure »/« action » se caracterise par l'analyse de quatre modeles existants de « structure »/« action » en sociologie, dans lesquels l'acteur et ses interets occupent une place essentielle