Academic Contagion: Social Network Analysis of the evolvement of Social Network Analysis as an Academic Discipline (original) (raw)
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2005
No one today is more equipped to explain how this happened than Linton C. Freeman. Freeman divides the history of social network analysis (SNA from here on) into four eras: (1) everything up to the end of the 1920s; (2) the 1930s; (3) the 30 years from about 1940 to 1969; and (4) the modern era, beginning when Harrison White (who had moved to Harvard in 1963) began producing the students who would become a who's-who of modern SNA. For every era, Freeman's rhetoric is devoid of disciplinary chauvinism. He draws from sociology, anthropology, psychology, mathematics, and physics and shows how it all came together, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by sheer accident, to become the international, multidisciplinary band of scholars who call themselves social network analysts today. In the Introduction, Freeman establishes the organizing principle of the book. Modern SNA, he says, is an organized paradigm for research and is defined by four features:
Networks in the Social Sciences
Corvinus Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 2016
While the subject of networks has been an issue in the social sciences for decades, it can still be regarded as one of the concepts significant enough to excite the imagination of both theorists and empirical researchers. Because of this interest, many different types of approaches to networks have been developed. In many cases these theoretical and analytical developments have occurred relatively independently from each other, using different vocabularies and research styles. This paper presents two prominent network approaches-namely, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Social Network Analysis (SNA)-in order to highlight the similarities and differences between the two. Besides providing a comparison, the paper discusses the potentially fruitful convergence of these two theories. We argue that ANT researchers could benefit from using certain SNA methods (such as visualization techniques and quantitative measures), whilst SNA researchers would benefit from developing new theoretical and empirical ideas about how to introduce non-human actors into networks that also contain humans.
Social network analysis: An introduccion
Forthcoming in Handbook of Social Network Analysis. …, 2009
Social network analysis takes as its starting point the premise that social life is created primarily and most importantly by relations and the patterns formed by these relations. Social networks are formally defined as a set of nodes (or network members) that are tied by one or more types of relations . Because network analysts take these networks as the primary building blocks of the social world, they not only collect unique types of data, they begin their analyses from a fundamentally different perspective than that adopted by individualist or attribute-based social science.
Social network analysis: a powerful strategy, also for the information sciences
Journal of Information Science, 2002
Social network analysis (SNA) is not a formal theory in soci- ology but rather a strategy for investigating social structures. As it is an idea that can be applied in many fields, we study, in particular, its influence in the information sciences. Information scientists study publication, citation and ...
Social Network Analysis in the Social and Behavioral Sciences
Social Network Analysis
Actors and their actions are viewed as interdependent rather than independent, autonomous units 0 Relational ties (linkages) between actors are channels for transfer or "flow" of resources (either material or nonmaterial) 0 Network models focusing on individuals view the network structural environment as providing opportunities for or constraints on individual action 0 Network models conceptualize structure (social, economic, political, and so forth) as lasting patterns of relations among actors In this section we discuss these principles further and illustrate how the social network perspective differs from alternative perspectives in practice. Of critical importance for the development of methods for
Aishe J the All Ireland Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 2014
Social network analysis (SNA), once a remote out-post in the realm of sociology research is suddenly in vogue. Everyone has heard of social networking and everyone is doing it - at least when we take it to mean connecting with virtual friends on Facebook, Twitter or the latest, trending social networking app through the smart-phone which has become permanently affixed to our hands. But in the social and, indeed, natural sciences, tools that allow us to study the interconnections between the components of complex systems are yielding powerful new insights as to how these systems function. How I make and break friendships might seem of little relevance to society at large, except for perhaps to my own happiness, but when an entire social grouping is studied in terms of the social links that connect the people in that society, it transpires that we can make inferences about how allegiances are formed, how rumours spread, which people are most influential and why. These inferences can be applied by businesses to better target customers for their services, or to better organise their management structures to allow better decisions to be made more quickly, to to identify the most valuable people in their organisation. Social network analysis has entered the realm of big business.
The network researchers' network: A social network analysis of the IMP Group 1984-2006
The Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) Group is a network of academic researchers working in the area of business-to-business marketing. The group meets every year to discuss and exchange ideas, with a conference having been held every year since 1984 (there was no meeting in 1987). In this paper, based upon the papers presented at the 22 conferences held to date, we undertake a Social Network Analysis in order to examine the degree of co-publishing that has taken place between this group of researchers. We identify the different components in this database, and examine the large main components in some detail. The egonets of three of the original 'founding fathers' are examined in detail, and we draw comparisons as to how their publishing strategies vary. Finally, the paper draws some more general conclusions as to the insights that SNA can bring to those working within business-to-business marketing.
A diverse array of research traditions has shaped the current state of social network theory. As summarizes, there are three lines of research that contributed to the theory's early development: the sociometric analysis tradition, which relies on graph theory methods from mathematics; the interpersonal relations tradition, which focuses on the formation of cliques among a group of individuals; and an anthropology tradition that explores the structure of community relations in less developed societies.