Networks

Conceptual Overview

One of the early contributions from the sociological perspective was theorizing by Georg Simmel, who attempted to explain the emergence of social phenomena in terms arising from exchanges, relations, and reciprocal action of human agents. He described society as a network of affiliations and a complex of intersubjective movements; i.e., intentional behavior and activities of conscious human actors. Social structures arise from relationships embedded in affiliations and intersubjective movements, and intersubjective dynamics that bond people together.

The actors in a network may be human, nonhuman, social artifacts, or time-specific events and activities. While network heterogeneity is evident for the earlier developments of social network analysis, with the formalization of the research methodology the network concept is reduced to dyadic interpersonal relationships or community type collective referrals.

Present ties are the existing relationships and exchanges that exist between members. The notion of absent ties in networks remains controversial and could be interpreted in many different ways. Absent ties could be, for example, unsatisfied needs for resources and information, or potential relationships; i.e., new opportunities for establishing ties with network members that have some resources at their disposal. In all cases, network membership based on existing ties is assumed.

The history of network analysis is traced back to the development of sociometry and graph theory. Subsequently, historians point to its developments within American sociology in the 1970s and 1980s, especially the development of the International Network for Social Network Analysis. The critical assumptions that underpin these developments are the following:

• Actors' behaviors depend in large part on how actors are linked to each other, and behavior results from the structural constraints on activity, such as the socialization of norms.
• Norms emerge from locations of actors in structured systems of social relationships.
• Network topology represents the structural configuration of the network.
• The network flow, or the flow of information between actors, depends on network topology and time.
• Diffusion is affected both by direct and strong ties, and by weak ties that enhance access to information and opportunities.
• Modern socioeconomic systems are constructed as lengthy chains of indirect exchanges, where direct reciprocity is often impossible.
• Interconnected complex exchanges reinforce inequalities (imbalances) and change actor's dependence on others.
• Power and inequality in a dyadic relation arises from ego's control over some resource valued by alter.

Special emphasis is put on the notion of structure as a network of networks, that may or may not be partitioned, and hence there is no clear guidance as to what are the building blocks or the boundaries of a structure.

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