Network Analysis, Social Dynamics and Feedback in Social Systems

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. The last four decades saw a massive development of concepts and tools for network analysis, initially spurred by anthropologist Clyde Mitchell and sociologist Harrison White. These developments enabled burgeoning applications to ever-wider sets of problems in the social sciences. The trajectories of social network analysis in the two disciplines, however, were very different. Network approaches in sociology became rather quickly a central theoretical paradigm for integrating the dynamics of human agency with theories of the feedback between structural constraints and the emergence of institutions out of human interaction (Mullins 1973, Berkowitz 1982, Burt 1982, Wellman 2000). Still, even in sociology, the development of methodology (Wasserman and Faust 1994) far outstripped that of an integrated theory of networks that situates explanatory principles in a common conceptual framework. The anthropology of the 1960s failed to see the more general relevance of an array of network modeling possibilities to social theory, and relegated network analysis to a ‘toolkit’ for specialized problems collateral to but mostly outside of institutional and cultural analysis. 1 Interest in networks largely died out in anthropology by the mid-1970s once those who had begin experimenting with the approach in the 1960s turned from problems of fluid social structure to the study of transactions, ritual enactment, symbolic action, and contemporary themes of cultural anthropology. Anthropologists with a cognitive focus narrowed their studies to the shared components of egocentric cognitive constructions in relation to observed behavior, studies that unfortunately didn’t recapture the interests of the field at large. In the past decade, however, 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 (see Johanson and White in Kemper and Royce 2002). 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: 55). Network theory has helped to formulate general explanatory frameworks to understand how multiple types of phenomena are linked and feedback on one another through their embeddings in multiple overlapping and interpenetrating network configurations. Rich ethnographic groundings for the study of multiple embedded network processes have begun to provide breakthroughs in the study of feedback processes (White and Houseman 2002). I will focus here on applications used to date for several long-term field site analyses. 1 Conceptual Perspective One of the key ingredients of scientific explanation and the testing of theory is the development of models that relate first principles, as a function of measurable parameters of interaction and structure, to a diversity of observable outcomes. Network theory generally, in so doing, attempts to explicate how social and cultural phenomena emerge out of interaction (such outcomes are path dependent). This may be done by measuring the properties of local interactions as well as different kinds of emergent structure, ideally through time, across observable networks of communication and of social and instrumental relations, events and activities. Table 1 shows some of the network concepts applicable to domains of social theory. Coupled with the modeling of fundamental interaction processes, they are designed to allow for measuring local network properties and structural emergents in order to test hypotheses about processes, interactions and outcomes. 2 The author’s PI participation in these projects were funded, most recently, under NSF grant #BCS-9978282, “Longitudinal Network Studies and Predictive Cohesion Theory,” in which Frank Harary is consultant. 2 (table 1 about here) The middle column in Table 1 lists the typical kind of mathematical model used for a particular concept. These different models can be used in combination both to build a general framework of interrelated models useful for formulating network theory, and to help test some of the hypotheses derived from network theory. 2 Structure and Dynamics