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2 - What Is Social Structure?

from Part I - Thinking Structurally

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 September 2023

Craig M. Rawlings
Affiliation:
Duke University, North Carolina
Jeffrey A. Smith
Affiliation:
Nova Scotia Health Authority
James Moody
Affiliation:
Duke University, North Carolina
Daniel A. McFarland
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
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Summary

The primary aim of social network analysis is building and evaluating theories of social structure – that is, enduring patterns of human interaction and ways of thinking about and organizing human groups. The sheer complexity of social structure prevents encapsulation in any single model, and this complexity is compounded as we incorporate cultural beliefs and social expectations in addition to interactions. Networks link actors to one another in systems, raising tricky questions about the locus of control and activity, particularly regarding the extent to which people are active agents or passive puppets (to put it bluntly) of social structure. While acknowledging deep and ultimately unsettled issues in the field, we provide readers with an overarching though still evolving theoretical account of social structure that can guide both inductive and deductive social network research and allow plug-in points for different perspectives on agency, culture, and constraint.

Type
Chapter
Information
Network Analysis
Integrating Social Network Theory, Method, and Application with R
, pp. 19 - 44
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Suggested Further Reading

Blau, Peter M. 1977. Inequality and Heterogeneity: A Primitive Theory of Social Structure. New York: Free Press. (Provides the foundation for work on homophily and opportunity structure; linking social relations, interests, and the intersection social characteristics. See also CATNETs by Harrison White.)Google Scholar
Bott, Elizabeth. 1957. Family and Social Network. New York: Taylor & Francis. (A lovely examination of the effects of gender and network segregation on role performance. Foundational work for the study of family and normative pressures in networks.)Google Scholar
Castells, Manuel. 2009. The Rise of Network Society. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. (Argues that modern social life is fundamentally changed by the advent of “information and communication technologies,” which allows for the widespread globalization of networks. See also the rich literature on World Systems Theory, particularly the empirical work of Christopher Chase-Dunn and colleagues.)Google Scholar
Coleman, James S. 1994. The Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press. (Attempts to build a social theory based on purposive action constrained by relational opportunities. Exemplar case of mathematical theorizing.)Google Scholar
Emirbayer, Mustafa. 1997. “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology 103: 281317. (Argues that the essence of any valid model for social structure has to be relational; provides a deep foundation for network models of social life.)Google Scholar
Hinde, Robert A. 1976. “Interactions, Relationships and Social Structure.” Man 11(1): 117. (Describes primate social structures from concrete interactions up to specific relations and types of relations and roles, groups, and types of groups. Basic framework of abstraction/concreteness and units of analysis to social structure.)Google Scholar
Martin, John Levi. 2009. Social Structures. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Provides a theoretical explanation of how types of relations constrain/construct types of aggregate social structures.)Google Scholar
McPherson, J. Miller. 1983. “An Ecology of Affiliation.” American Sociological Review 48(4): 519–32. (A key work summarizing the macrostructural homophily perspective on social organization. See also McPherson and Ranger-Moore 1991 and anything by Bruce Mayhew.)Google Scholar
McPherson, J. Miller, and Ranger-Moore, James. 1991. “Evolution on a Dancing Landscape: Organizations and Networks in Dynamic Blau Space.” Social Forces 70: 1942. (See the note to McPherson 1983.)Google Scholar
Nadel, Siegfried Frederick. 1957. The Theory of Social Structure. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. (Presents roles as interrelated systems of social expectations and obligations.)Google Scholar
Sewell, William H. 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98: 129. (Integrates agency as a type of structure, drawing on insights from Giddens and Bourdieu.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simmel, Georg. 1950. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. (Overview of many elemental ideas of social networks concerning relations, dyads, triads, and organizations, as well as issues of size, reciprocity, and tertius gaudens.)Google Scholar
Simmel, Georg. 2010 [1908]. Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. (Describes how overlapping social circles can be theorized and studied and how they organize in society.)Google Scholar
Somers, Margaret R. 1994. “The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach.” Theory and Society 23: 605–49. (Offers a theoretically informed account of relational sociology and how identities are more akin to narratives and stories.)Google Scholar
Turner, Jonathan H. 1978. The Structure of Sociological Theory, 7th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. (A general theory reader with a rich discussion of the structural-functional roots of early role-behavior models.)Google Scholar
White, Harrison C. 1992. Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (An effort to present a synthetic theory of social structure that draws on cultural turn sociology [interactionist and sociolinguistic] and social network theories concerning roles, but with extensions to macrostructures and processes, like disciplines and network domains.)Google Scholar
Bainbridge, William Sims. 2020. The Social Structure of Online Communities. New York: Cambridge University Press. (For obvious reasons, novices often conflate social media and social networks; this work provides a clear example of how to apply deep network thinking to online communities without falling prey to computational approaches that speak only to scale and not substance.)Google Scholar
Bearman, Peter. 1997. “Generalized Exchange.” American Journal of Sociology 102: 1383–415. (Using blockmodels of kinship exchange, this paper provides a clear example of how people enact social structure, even if they cannot articulate why they do so.)Google Scholar
Gibson, David R. 2003. “Participation Shifts: Order and Differentiation in Group Conversation.” Social Forces 81: 1335–80. (Empirical example of how relational events of different sequential turn-taking strategies inform the development of roles and networks.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gould, Roger V. 1991. “Multiple Networks and Mobilization in the Paris Commune, 1871.” American Sociological Review 56(6): 716–29. (Uses data on deaths and fighting across neighborhoods and blockmodel analysis to reveal the underlying structural basis of conflict.)Google Scholar
Mizruchi, Mark S., and Schwartz, Michael (eds.). 1988. Intercorporate Relations: The Structural Analysis of Business. New York: Cambridge University Press. (A nice early edited volume on network approaches to economic action.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Padgett, John F., and Ansell, Christopher K.. 1993. “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400–1434.” American Journal of Sociology 98(6): 1259–319. (A historical illustration of how a political system emerges out of the interactions and alliance systems of Renaissance elite family politics.)Google Scholar

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