“Structural Equivalence of Individuals in Social Networks”

The 1971 article by François Lorrain and Harrison C. White titled “Structural Equivalence of Individuals in Social Networks” and published in the Journal of Mathematical Sociology intends to further our understanding of the interrelations among in the connections in social groups. The authors introduced an approach to social network analysis that pays special attention to identifying social positions and roles. The algebraic procedure of aggregating relationships and individuals concurrently presented in this article allows for distilling “global patterns” of social positions and roles.

The original article is structured as follows: Lorrain and White start by presenting the general aim of the article besides arguing for the significance of global patterns to be explored. They then present fundamental network analytic terms and models and introduce their own ...