Social, political, and economic institutions covary with one another in heterogenous ways across space and time. Social Network Analysis (SNA) offers a set of analytical tools and conceptual frameworks that have allowed for formal comparisons of interactions, affiliations, and relationships in reconstructing historical trajectories of institutional change. Although archaeologists have made full use of a range of metrics that describe the structural variation of social networks, formal approaches to analyzing the covariance of networks, and the institutions that structured networks in the past, remain undertheorized. In most cases, descriptive metrics are compared between networks built from different datasets or networks separated in time. Using quadratic assignment procedure (QAP) correlations to compare matrices of archaeological data, I draw on a ceramic dataset of approximately 350,000 sherds from the Southern Appalachian region to investigate how decisions related to manufacture choice and to stylistic design covaried with one another between roughly AD 800 and 1650. I explore how material attributes may or may not vary independently of one another and what that means for our analyses of the institutions they reflect. The results contribute to broader comparative analyses of institutional change and perennial discussions of social evolution.

As archaeologists expand the accessibility of legacy data, they have an opportunity to use these datasets to design future research. We argue that legacy data can be a critical resource to help predict characteristics of sites and socioeconomic systems. In this article, we present a combined geographic information system (GIS) and network analysis methodology that turns site location data into testable hypotheses about site characteristics and the organization of regional settlement systems. We demonstrate the utility of this approach with a case study: Bronze Age (2700–1100 BC) settlement patterns in the mining region of Hunedoara in southwest Transylvania, Romania. We leverage unsystematically collected site location information in legacy datasets to develop testable predictions about sites, regional networks, and socioeconomic systems that can be evaluated through future systematic surveys and large-scale excavations. Such testable hypotheses can inform archaeological research design by providing a quantitative basis for determining where to focus research efforts and can also help secure funding and fieldwork permits. The method developed here can be applied in diverse archaeological contexts to reinvigorate legacy data as part of future archaeological research design.

This paper analyses economic interaction in Castilla del Oro (Panama) at the beginning of the 16th century. By applying network analysis to fiscal records, the paper reconstructs, represents and tests business networks in the mining sector and how they became more complex with the arrival of emigrants and the appearance of new gold deposits. Results show a dynamic population with a high mobility degree despite the adverse geography and the inexistent communications.

Using recent substantive results on China and the West, we highlight some virtues to Mill's method of residues for comparative network research. The result is research that combines the emic-etic approaches discussed by Leung (2009) with the spirit of Whetten's (2009: 49) efforts to make ‘theory borrowing more context sensitive’. We draw on recent comparative research about the competitive advantage enjoyed by network brokers, trust facilitated by embedding a relationship in a closed network, the subset of Chinese relations that constitute guanxi, the idea of American and European guanxi, different business environments maintained by the same network mechanism, cocoon networks, small-world networks, the longer history apparent in Chinese networks, and job search via colleagues, friends, and family. We also illustrate the value of data graphs for the expository value of the method of residuals in comparative network analyses.

Existing research shows that the ideas of judges shape their behaviour. A natural next question to ask is, where do these ideas come from? Yet, there is little empirical evidence regarding the content and distribution of these ideas and even less evidence regarding the sources of these ideas, especially how ideas transfer or diffuse among judges. In this article, a survey of judges in the Mexican state of Michoacán generates original data on the attitudes and professional ties among these legal elites, and a mixed-methods design examines the diffusion of these attitudes along these ties, sequencing quantitative network analyses and interviews with judges to strengthen causal inferences. The core finding that the social structure of judges influences the attitudes judges hold contributes a valuable analytic complement to scholarship on comparative judicial behaviour, and clarifies our understanding of the role of judicial networks in strengthening democracy and the rule of law.