Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications
Cambridge University Press, (1994)Аннотация
The series Structural Analysis in the Social ~ciincesp resents approaches
that explain social behavior and institutions by reference to relations
among such concrete entities as persons and organizations. This contrasts
with at least four other popular strategies: (a) reductionist attempts
to explain by a focus on individuals alone; (b) explanations stressing the
causal primacy of such abstract concepts as ideas, values, mental harmonies,
and cognitive maps (thus, "structuralism" on the Continent
should be distinguished from structural analysis in the present sense);
(c) technological and material determinism; (d) explanations using "variables"
as the main analytic concepts (as in the "structural equation"
models that dominated much of the sociology of the 1970s), where
structure is that connecting variables rather than actual social entities.
The social network approach is an important example of the strategy
of structural analysis; the series also draws on social science theory and
research that is not framed explicitly in network terms, but stresses the
importance of relations rather than the atomization of reductionism or
the determinism of ideas, technology, or material conditions. Though
the structural perspective has become extremely popular and influential
in all the social sciences, it does not have a coherent identity, and no
series yet pulls together such work under a single rubric. By bringing
the achievements of structurally oriented scholars to a wider public, the
Structural Analysis series hopes to encourage the use of this very fruitful
approach.
