Network Analysis and Social Dynamics

Network analysis, an area of mathematical sociology and anthropology crucial to the linking of theory and observation, developed dramatically in recent decades. These developments make possible a theoretical synthesis of social network theory in relation to understanding social dynamics. The past 35 years, initially spurred by anthropologist Clyde Mitchell and sociologist Harrison White, saw a massive development of concepts and tools for network analysis and burgeoning applications to everwider sets of problems in the social sciences. The trajectories of social network analysis in the two disciplines were very different, however. In anthropology, where it was introduced in the 1960s as a collateral tool to institutional and cultural analysis, the network paradigm did not become a central contributor to theory, as in sociology. Still, even in sociology, the development of methodology (Wasserman and Faust 1994) has far outstripped that of an integrated theory of networks that situates explanatory principles in a common conceptual framework. The lack of such developments is notable in both disciplines. In the past decade, however, developments that foster the study of network dynamics have provided more general explanatory frameworks in an emergent network theory. This framework is particularly important in the context of long-term field research in anthropology (Kemper and Royce 2002). I will focus here on applications used 1 Unlike sociology, which defined and forged ahead with social networks as a theoretical paradigm (Mullins 1975, Berkowitz 1982, Burt 1982) on a par with "heavy-duty approaches such as structure-functionalism, Marxism, and ethnomethodology” (Wellman 2000:4), interest in networks largely died out in anthropology once those experimenting with the approach in the 1960s and early 1970s 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. (to appear in J. Cybernetics and Systems) 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, 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.