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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Cultural Sociology
- Sprache: Englisch
Today, interest in networks is growing by leaps and bounds, in both scientific discourse and popular culture. Networks are thought to be everywhere – from the architecture of our brains to global transportation systems. And networks are especially ubiquitous in the social world: they provide us with social support, account for the emergence of new trends and markets, and foster social protest, among other functions. Besides, who among us is not familiar with Facebook, Twitter, or, for that matter, World of Warcraft, among the myriad emerging forms of network-based virtual social interaction?
It is common to think of networks simply in structural terms – the architecture of connections among objects, or the circuitry of a system. But social networks in particular are thoroughly interwoven with cultural things, in the form of tastes, norms, cultural products, styles of communication, and much more. What exactly flows through the circuitry of social networks? How are people's identities and cultural practices shaped by network structures? And, conversely, how do people's identities, their beliefs about the social world, and the kinds of messages they send affect the network structures they create? This book is designed to help readers think about how and when culture and social networks systematically penetrate one another, helping to shape each other in significant ways.
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Seitenzahl: 407
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
1 Culture and Social Networks: A Conceptual Framework
Some Caveats
Note
PART I Fundamental Concepts
2 The Nuts and Bolts of Networks, through a Cultural Lens
The Most Basic Network Concepts: Nodes/Actors and Edges/Ties
Ego-Networks
The Dyad
The Crucial Notion of Homophily
The Critical Importance of Triads
From Triads to Larger Network Structures
Conclusion
Note
3 Basic Culture Concepts, with a Networks Inflection
Important Elements of Culture for the Sociology of Networks
Important Approaches to Culture for the Sociology of Networks
Why Cultural Sociology Needs Networks
Conclusion
Note
PART II Linkages of Networks with Culture
4 Culture through Networks: Diffusion, Contagion, Virality, Memes
How Social Networks Affect Diffusion
Networks, Culture, and Diffusion with Respect to Social Movements
Global Social Movements and Diffusion in the Internet Age
Diffusion Elsewhere: Religion, Economy, Health, Fashion
One New Direction: The Diffusion of Memes
Conclusion
Note
5 Culture from Networks: The Network Genesis of Culture
Roles and Identities from Positions: The Structuralist Approach
Networks as Sites of Norm Enforcement and Taste Convergence
Networks as Incubators of Culture: Conceptual Foundations
Networks as Germinators of Culture: Empirical Applications
Conclusion
Note
6 Networks from Culture: How Norms and Tastes Shape Networks
Tastes and their Manifestation in Network Structure
Cultural Skill in Discourse
Norms and Schemas
Conclusion
Note
7 Networks of Culture: Culture as Relational Structures
One-mode versus Two-mode Analysis
Empirical Applications
Topic Modeling
Two-Mode Networks
Conclusion
Note
8 Networks as Culture, or Networks and Culture Fused
Historical Cases of “Network Cultures”
Network Cultures in Organizations
Contemporary Global Social Movements and the Public Sphere
Characterizing the “Network Society”
Networked Individualism on the Internet
Blogs and Games: The Future of Network/Culture Intersections?
Conclusion
Note
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Cultural Sociology series
Culture and Cognition: Patterns in the Social Construction of Reality, Wayne H. Brekhus
Protest: A Cultural Introduction to Social Movements, James M. Jasper Culture in Networks, Paul McLean
The Culture of Markets, Frederick F. Wherry
Culture in Networks
Paul McLean
polity
Copyright © Paul McLean 2017
The right of Paul McLean to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8720-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication dataNames: McLean, Paul Douglas, 1962– author.Title: Culture in networks / Paul McLean.Description: Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016012611| ISBN 9780745687162 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780745687179 (paperback: alk. paper)Subjects: LCSH: Social networks. | Culture. | Culture diffusion.Classification: LCC HM741 .M3895 2016 | DDC 302.3--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012611
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
I would first like to thank Jonathan Skerrett of Polity who guided me along the process to completion of this project with gentle yet enthusiastic support – even when I periodically blew up at him via email with my frustrations. I would also like to acknowledge the input of two anonymous reviewers for Polity – one of whom strongly encouraged me to believe that what I was doing was worthwhile, the other of whom pushed me hard to try to make this a more coherent and useful book.
Many scholars have helped me to think about networks and culture in interesting ways over the years. Rather than identify them by name, I hope their influence will be evident repeatedly in the pages of this book. However, I would like to single out my teacher and collaborator, John Padgett, for encouraging me onto this path of exploring the cultural aspects of social networks many years ago.
I appreciate the assistance of May Nguyen, Haniyyah Hopkins and Susan Jaw, who at different times provided me with a great deal of help in organizing the bibliography for this book. Leigh Mueller did a great job of copy-editing the manuscript.
Much of this book was written in a faculty study at the Alexander Library at Rutgers University, where I could utilize the library’s terrific collection of materials. Although I developed no strong personal relationship with the staff of the library during my evening and weekend sojourns there, I am very grateful for the use of that space, and simply for the existence of such a welcoming place in which to work. I am a huge fan of the open-stacks, public university library, of which Alex is a great example.
I would like to thank all of my colleagues and friends in the Sociology department at Rutgers University for providing me with a hospitable academic home for the last sixteen-plus years. In particular, I thank Debby Carr, Chip Clarke, Jeanie Danner, Judy Gerson, Lisa Iorillo, Joanna Kempner, Laurie Krivo, Diane Molnar, Julie Phillips, Pat Roos, Zakia Salime, Hana Shepherd, Randy Smith, Kristen Springer, Dianne Yarnell, and Eviatar Zerubavel for times spent talking in each other’s offices or otherwise hanging out. I also greatly appreciate the intellectual stimulation I received, especially with respect to the conjoined topics of networks and culture, from two former colleagues: John Levi Martin, now at the University of Chicago, and Ann Mische, now at the University of Notre Dame. I miss them both. I very much appreciate the network ties I have formed with Marya Doerfel, Keith Hampton, and Matt Weber in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers over the last several years. And I would also like to give a shout-out to Professor Brad Evans in Rutgers’ excellent English department, for our stimulating discussions about novels, networks, and the digital humanities, and simply for his friendship.
I owe my biggest debt to many students – both graduate students and undergraduates – who, in various ways, have stimulated my interest in the diverse intersections of social networks and culture, and led me to think of those intersections more coherently. In particular, I have in mind Jeff Dowd, Gina Giacobbe, Neha Gondal, Anne Kavalerchik, Preeti Khanolkar, Eric Kushins, Vanina Leschziner, Yusheng Lin, Janet Lorenzen, Derek Ludovici, Sourabh Singh, Kathy Smith, Eunkyung Song, Charles Tong, and King-to Yeung. I would like to thank Neha in particular for the especially formative role she has played in developing my understanding of, and my approach to, networks and culture, through our collaborative research.
On a more personal note, I’d like to thank Susan Liebell for being the best co-parent anyone could hope for. I thank my two younger children, Adam and Julia Liebell-McLean, who turned me into the father of twins – a network position I never anticipated occupying – in 1999, and who have lent so much meaning to my life ever since. Finally, I thank my older son, Eli Liebell-McLean, for the ways he too has enriched my life. And I dedicate this little book to him, cognizant that he has a deeper but also more intuitive grasp of the ways culture and networks go together than I am ever likely to have.
1Culture and Social Networks: A Conceptual Framework
This book provides an extended treatment of the various ways in which we can imagine social networks to intersect with culture. The term social network refers to a set of entities – actors, organizations, or locations, for example – and the ties that exist among them. Social network analysis refers to a set of concepts and procedures by means of which social network properties may be analyzed. The term culture is one of the most complex terms in the social sciences to define, but we can understand it broadly to refer to the knowledge, beliefs, expectations, values, practices, and material objects by means of which we craft meaningful experiences for ourselves and with each other. It might help a bit to think of networks as hardware (circuitry) and culture as software (rules and routines for action), although that analogy is deceptively clear. The circuitry is largely inert without rules or recipes specifying how the parts go together, how information is to be created, and how communication flow will be controlled. On the other hand, the products that may be potentially created via the software are activated only via concrete pathways and connections existing in network form. Again, the analogy is simplistic, but it has the merit of reinforcing the idea that social networks and culture go together synthetically, even necessarily. What varies is only the extent to which either network structure or cultural recipes are emphasized in order to answer specific research questions.
The amount of scholarly attention devoted to the two topics of networks and culture, taken separately, has grown tremendously in recent years. The International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) hosts an annual conference of ever-growing proportions, and it is home to a highly active listserv for the discussion of all kinds of networks-related questions. Meanwhile, the Culture section of the American Sociological Association has grown into one of the very largest since the late 1990s.
More substantively speaking, on the networks side, although the roots of social network analysis run back to the 1930s,1 since the turn of the new century we have witnessed the birth of the so-called “new science of networks” (Watts 1999, 2003; Barabási 2002). According to this perspective, networks are understood to be everywhere – from cellular structure to the architecture of our brains and the mechanics of information processing, from transportation systems to global trade patterns. More to the point for our purposes here, networks are ubiquitous in the social world (Christakis and Fowler 2009). For example, networks provide us with social support (Wellman and Wortley 1990; Rainie and Wellman 2012), they reputedly help us find jobs (Granovetter 1995), they affect disease transmission (Morris 1993), they knit together social and political elites (Knoke 1993; Domhoff 2010), they exist in the structure of ownership in advanced capitalist economies (Mizruchi 1992; Burris 2005), they account for the emergence of new industries and organizational forms (Powell et al. 2005; Padgett and Powell 2012), they foster and support social protest (Diani and McAdam 2003), and much, much more. Besides all of that, who among us is not familiar with Facebook and Twitter, or for that matter World of Warcraft or Second Life or Reddit, among the myriad emerging forms of media where virtual social interaction takes place on a massive scale (e.g., Lewis et al. 2008)? These relatively new venues of social behavior work fundamentally on network principles, even if they remain under-explored using formal social network analytic tools.2 Indeed, the internet itself is a giant network of communication links. We live in a “connected” (Christakis and Fowler 2009), “networked” (Castells 1996) world. Networks are our social “operating system” (Rainie and Wellman 2012).
With respect to the culture side of the picture, for several decades now we have understood the social world in the wake of the “cultural turn” in the social sciences (Bonnell and Hunt 1999; Jacobs and Spillman 2005).3 After the cultural turn, culture can no longer be seen as something simply derived from social structure – as if, for example, the democratic structure of government and democratic nature of our society ensured that we adhere to democratic values fully, consistently, and unquestioningly. An adequate treatment of the cultural turn would take us deep into social theory and the philosophy of knowledge, topics well beyond the scope of this book. Suffice to say for present purposes that historians and social scientists in the late 1970s began to turn away from accounts of social reality that focused on concrete material relations in society, such as instances of economic exploitation, to accounts that took culture seriously – culture not only in the sense of cultural objects such as art, music, theatre, or dance, but in the form of jointly produced language, symbols, schemas, institutions, and much more. Culture became newly understood as an engine of social change, and/or as webs of significance (Geertz 1973) through which we perceive, and operate in, the material world. Stated succinctly, culture became a vital, vibrant element of social explanation. The turn to culture also entailed for many scholars a turn away from positivist4 approaches to social explanation to more interpretive approaches. Frequently enough, too, the cultural turn was accompanied by more critical methods for analyzing social phenomena – methods that unpacked and historicized taken-for-granted cultural beliefs, norms, values, institutions, social classification categories, and previously unexamined practices that structure the social world and systematically privilege certain groups over others (McDonald 1996; Adams et al. 2005). By these standards – a redefinition of what culture is, a new appreciation of its various manifestations, and an awareness of its independent role in sustaining inequalities of social power – attention to culture became also a new way of doing sociology, indicated in part by use of the label “strong program” with respect to the practice of cultural sociology (Alexander 2003; Friedland and Mohr 2004; Reed and Alexander 2009; Alexander et al. 2012).
The amount of scholarly attention devoted to the ways network and culture combine has similarly grown since 2000. But knowledge of how they may be combined may not be widely appreciated – especially by those new to the area – in part because of the longstanding character of research on each topic. Networks and culture have sometimes seemed antithetical to each other. For one thing, it has sometimes been too easy to think of networks simply in structural terms. Recall my “hardware” analogy from the beginning of this chapter: Networks constitute the architecture of connections among objects, and so they describe spatial patterns that “determine” where we can travel or where power flows. Some early work on networks insisted on the primacy of structure over content, and the comparability of the properties of social organization across networks without attending to relational content or symbolic meanings. Actually, that is a very cool idea! We need abstract models of social structures in order to develop theoretical claims, as Georg Simmel (1971b) argued long ago in “The Problem of Sociology.” But there is justified concern that such a desire for developing arguments for the autonomy or even primacy of structure can go too far. Fascination today with the structural properties of networks – small worlds, six degrees of separation, clustering coefficients, degree distributions, preferential attachment, and so on, are some of the notions eagerly studied – under the rubric of the “new science of networks” is at risk of treating cultural processes and cultural content in a rather mechanical way, or ignoring them altogether. When we think of a social network architecture or circuitry, we ought to be thinking: what exactly is it that flows through this circuitry? What sustains this flow? How does change come about in network structures? How do people interact with each other inside these networks? How are people’s identities – the faces they present, the goals they pursue, and the interests they develop – shaped by network structures? Conversely, how do people’s identities, their beliefs about the social world, and the kinds of messages they send affect the kinds of network structures they create and how those networks evolve? How do people’s expectations shape the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of social network ties? These questions of cultural forms, content and practices seem especially important today and for the foreseeable future as we shift our attention increasingly to social media: large-scale networks of interpersonal communication.
Not only because of the structuralist bent of some network analysis, but also because of the methodological shift toward interpretation and (more or less) away from the measurement and collection of “hard” data after the cultural turn, cultural approaches and network structural approaches would seem to make strange bedfellows.5 Nevertheless, when starting with an interest in culture – that is, processes of meaning-making, identity formation, and communication using existing practices and symbols – thinking in network terms can help us to understand with more precision where and how new cultural ideas arise, how they are disseminated, where they collect, and why they might be unevenly distributed in society.
Throughout the rest of this book, I will adumbrate diverse analytical intersections of culture and networks: that is, various ways the analysis of social networks and the analysis of culture can be brought together. I do not argue for the superiority of one intersection over another. As I noted above, where the causal emphasis falls and how network analytical and cultural tools are used is largely a matter of the research questions one cares to answer. But all of these intersections are interesting because they address, head on, the fact that social life is comprised of both patterns of interactions and relations on the one hand, and communicative meaning-making processes on the other. I sort these different intersections of networks and culture into five main subtopics or themes, and I devote one chapter to each theme. As a shorthand tool, I use a different preposition to represent the nature of the culture/network linkage for each theme. These themes are as follows:
Culture
THROUGH
networks: in
chapter 4
, I will discuss primarily the
diffusion
or
flow
of cultural materials – innovations, ideas, practices, frames, commitments – within networks. One of the key ways in which we can build a more culturally rich understanding of diffusion is by keeping in mind the idea that, as objects and ideas diffuse, they are frequently re-invented (Rogers 2003) or adapted to new locales. In recent times, with respect to the diffusion of memes on the internet, such re-invention is practically definitional, as people creatively adapt and/or parody visual images through the apparatus of Photoshop and similar applications. I discuss some general models put forward by sociologists of how and where culture spreads through networks, and I focus illustratively on the extensive research on social movements that stresses the spread of people, protest commitments, repertoires of action, symbols, and frames across multiple movements.
Culture
FROM
networks: here I have in mind the
creation
of culture as a product of network structure, specifically in the form of emergent identities and roles, as well as the distinctly different idea of the
production
of culture via interaction in social networks. I treat these topics in
chapter 5
. I discuss some classic sociological research that used blockmodeling to argue that people occupy particular roles in a network structure, and that occupancy of these roles determines their social identities, thereby strongly shaping their opportunities and practices. However, I also discuss at length a strand of research stressing that networks may be particularly fecund spaces in which invention and innovation arise in all kinds of creative fields, from science and philosophy to music and visual arts.
Networks
FROM
culture: in
chapter 6
, I pick up the idea that the shape of networks may well be based on participants’ cultural preferences and practices, and the kinds of norms that exist that compel us to look to certain people for certain kinds of social support. To think in this way lends culture a more “programmatic” function than we encountered in the previous two chapters. Culture may also be thought of in part as a toolkit of practices and styles people utilize as they
manage
their networks. I also discuss how culture guides the social ties we form, and how different kinds of cultural endowments (cultural capital) empower us to take advantage of network opportunities (social capital) to different extents. Networks may be seen not so much as rigid structures, but as flexible fabrics providing opportunities for interaction.
Networks
OF
culture (or culture
AS
networks): network ideas can be used to analyze culture and cultural phenomena as
relational “systems.”
In
chapter 7
, I discuss how certain symbols, certain words, certain ideas, and so on, are linked, either by virtue of their co-occurrence in particular texts, or by virtue of their joint deployment by specific users. What is most at stake here is the understanding and mapping of culture as
meaning
, or, more precisely, culture as comprised of a set of meanings formed in relation to each other.
Networks
AS
culture: in
chapter 8
, we explore ways in which particular cultures – both historical examples and contemporary ones – are thought to entail a kind of networking mentality. Some scholars argue, for instance, that networks in the contemporary world bear within them, inherently, certain kinds of cultural values and beliefs, so that their construction and composition assume that imprint. Culture is not merely a property of actors, nor something “out there” affecting what people think and do, but is embedded as meanings attached directly to specific kinds of network ties and forms of social interaction. In the latter part of this chapter, I discuss in an exploratory way new frontiers for thinking about intersections of social networks and culture: in internet-based activity, especially Web 2.0 sites, and in virtual gameplay. Growing literatures in communications, media studies, and game studies describe these worlds, but not very much work by sociologists has yet tried to integrate network-oriented and culture-oriented approaches to them.
Before we explore these diverse empirical intersections of networks and culture, however, I devote chapter 2 to an overview of important concepts and measures in social network analysis, though with a cultural inflection, and chapter 3 to a discussion of important concepts and arguments in cultural sociology, with a view to integrating them into the study of networks. My hope is that you can refer to these fundamental concepts and arguments recurrently as needed as you make your way through the rest of the book.
An integrated study of networks and culture is one vital way of carrying out a richly relational form of sociology (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Emirbayer 1997; White 2008; DiMaggio 2011; Fuhse and Mützel 2011; see especially Crossley 2011 and Mische 2011). The basic premise of relational sociology, to put it a little too simply, is that relations, rather than fully formed individuals or fixed social structures, are the proper object and fundamental unit of analysis for sociological research. Individual preferences and actions vary in different relational situations, implying that “social structure” at the macro level and “individual preference” at the micro level are concepts too rigid to account for the variation we observe in social life on a constant and ongoing basis. Studying networks is a way of processing the relationality of the world through a structural lens. Studying culture is a way of interpreting the relational basis of the meanings by which we organize our lives. Putting the two together helps us think about how these two modes of relation also mutually influence each other.
Some Caveats
A few words may be in order here to clarify my objectives in this book. First, attempting to survey such a vast, varied, and growing landscape of research is a humbling process. I cannot possibly cover topics exhaustively, but I will discuss quite a lot of fascinating literature with as much clarity as I can. Some portion of this material is not easy to understand. But hopefully my account of it will be tantalizing enough, even when not as subtle as it might be, for you to be encouraged to seek out and wrestle with the original material itself.
More worrisome than the treatment of individual authors or publications is the effort to identify and follow a thread connecting them, simply because multiple different ways of lumping topics exist (Zerubavel 1991). For one example, I defer discussion of the notion of duality to chapter 7, as it is a foundational idea for several of the authors and research projects discussed in that chapter. But it also could easily be brought up in the context of my discussion of Robert Faulkner’s Music on Demand (1983) in chapter 5. The specific significance of some of the fundamental, building-block concepts utilized in network analysis and in sociological treatments of culture may not be too clear when they are first discussed in chapters 2 and 3, but it is necessary to lay out some of those building blocks in advance, rather than pause and re-cover that ground each time they are raised in the rest of the book.
I have been guided by a couple of broad selection strategies. First, without any hope of covering the field comprehensively, I have tried to be catholic in my coverage of material, rather than focusing on a very small number of exemplars. I believe it is important for readers to get a sense of the many ways the culture/networks intersection has been explored. Even more importantly, I want to prompt readers to strike out in their own directions to see what new cases and themes they can explore. For example, the ongoing explosive growth in the use of social media and the continued proliferation of participation in massively multiplayer online games are creating ever newer, formally specifiable network structures in which culture operates. The rules and norms of engagement and interaction in these spaces, and participants’ relationship to the identities they adopt there, are rich terrain for analysis, but to date the surface of these involvements has barely been scratched by sociologists. For another example, formal network tools are being adopted in increasing volume by scholars in the humanities, especially in literature and in history, and young researchers ought to be aware of the opportunities for interdisciplinary work at the networks/culture intersection.
My second selection strategy has been that, while I have tried to think expansively and creatively about what a network is, and what culture is, I have left out a considerable quantity of research that doesn’t quite include both networks and culture. As a result, this book is not the best introduction to social networks and network analysis in general. Among the networks topics barely mentioned here is the burgeoning literature examining network aspects of health and disease. Nor do I discuss much research on economic networks, at least not insofar as it treats topics like corporate coalition-building or labor markets. Something similar could be said for the culture side of the picture. There is a wealth of great cultural sociology – even cultural sociology that explicitly analyzes the production of cultural objects like music and film – that lacks any explicit grounding in concrete applications of network ideas. To name just one such example, there is fascinating research on the way symbolic boundaries are created and maintained (Lamont and Fournier 1992), but unless that boundary work is clearly established and maintained through identifiably network-based processes, I omit it here. Extending this clarification further, there are many aspects of social life in which we can speak metaphorically of networks. Groups or “groupings” are sometimes talked about as “networks” without specifying the concrete pattern of relations that comprise them; states are said to operate through “networks” of power; the global system is sometimes talked about as a “network” of forces, institutions, and organizations (for example, Castells 1996); opinion circulates through a population conceived as a kind of “network”; and so on. For the most part, I restrict myself to cases in which formal network analytic methods have been utilized in empirical research. In some instances, I expand my reach into areas where I believe formal network analytic methods could be applied in a relatively concrete way. I don’t wish to discourage more innovative applications of network ideas, and especially I don’t wish to discourage culturally minded sociologists from engaging with network concepts. In fact, bringing culture into networks has been an important part of my own research agenda. That said, I would like to ensure that that engagement is carried out with some precision.
With any research topic, we can bring culture in. I strongly believe that claim, but I am not intent on developing that particular polemic in this book. I also will have little to say about networks studies that deal with notions of social “behavior” or “information” in what I consider to be a rather flat way. We could undoubtedly brainstorm at length about the cultural assumptions and cognitive classifications that continually shape what some researchers simply refer to as “behavior.” For example, bullying in high school networks can be examined from a largely behavioral point of view (Faris and Felmlee 2011); and yet it is also true that bullying is guided by social norms and expectations and frequently entails distinctively encoded and richly symbolic practices (Paluck and Shepherd 2012). Or consider gang violence or other cognate forms of inter-group conflict, which are susceptible to being treated as behavior, and yet are also highly culturally encoded (Gould 2003; Papachristos 2009). Similarly, what some scholars call “information flow” could probably be cast as “communicative interaction based on shared, institutionalized protocols.” To do so renders much clearer the cultural underpinnings of the objects of such research; however, it is not my goal to bring culture (or networks) into everything, but to do so within practical limits.
To sum up, this book surveys a variety of ways in which the study of social networks and the study of culture have intersected in the past, and it offers some ideas about how to broaden and deepen that cross-fertilization in future research. I hope it will demonstrate that these perspectives are not narrow, subdisciplinary perspectives, but instead offer a framework for analyzing a great diversity of social phenomena in a refreshing and insightful light.
Note
1.
For a treatment of the early years of network analysis, I recommend looking at a general overview book on networks, such as Kadushin (2012) or Scott (2013).
2.
A vast percentage of the huge, ongoing accumulation of data in the world is network-type data: phone records, Facebook records, Twitter tweets, hyperlinks, visits to internet sites, GPS tracking of human visits to social locales, and so on. Bail (2014) notes that we currently collect more data every two days than was collected in all of history prior to the dawn of the twenty-first century, and a lot of it is this kind of social network data. Chances are network research will continue to grow exponentially in a corresponding manner.
3.
Key exemplars of that turn include Clifford Geertz (1973), Marshall Sahlins (1976), Pierre Bourdieu (1984 and 1990), Lynn Hunt (1984), William Sewell (1992), and Fredric Jameson (1998).
4.
By “positivist,” I mean a method of doing research that centrally involves hypothesis testing, typically carried out by means of the statistical analysis of quantitative data.
5.
Indeed, some exemplary efforts at studying culture quantitatively and/or formally have recently come under scathing attack (Biernacki 2012a).
PART IFundamental Concepts
2The Nuts and Bolts of Networks, through a Cultural Lens
In this chapter, we will cover some of the most important concepts and arguments in the world of social network analysis, so that you can develop familiarity with the basic terminology and core ideas that will help you as you proceed through this book and beyond.1 In the subsequent chapter, I perform not exactly the same exercise, but a similar one, with respect to core ideas in the sociological treatment of culture, focusing especially on those concepts and theories of most relevance to networks research. In both chapters, I aim to discuss these distinctly different sets of fundamental concepts in light of each other. Thus, in this chapter, as I introduce and discuss basic network concepts, I note at each step how cultural themes and issues arise. In a sense, one could see this as problematizing network concepts from a cultural perspective, but I prefer to focus on the positively framed goal of pursuing ideas about how culturally informed thinking can enhance the substantive practice of network analysis, not undermine it. In the next chapter, I pursue the companion goal of exploring how network analytic thinking can enhance the ways cultural sociology may be done, to a significant extent by emphasizing the ways culture is frequently created, transmitted, and altered through concrete instances of social interaction, traceable via social network analysis.
The Most Basic Network Concepts: Nodes/Actors and Edges/Ties
A network is comprised of a set of entities and the connections existing among them. When thinking of social networks in particular, we frequently refer to (and conceive of) the entities as actors; however, nothing requires that they be individual people. They could be collectives, like families, or companies, or organizations, or states. As we will see later, they could also be things like words, or texts, or actions, or emotions, or just about anything existing in some relational nexus that comprises (or impinges upon) social life. Especially when we think of a network in graphic terms, as a set of points with lines connecting them in a web-like pattern, we may refer to the entities as nodes, or vertices, and the ties as edges or arcs. This vocabulary can be quite useful in its abstractness. It gets us away from assuming that the entities in a network are necessarily rational actors, with the specific mental equipment to make rational, self-interested decisions – as if that were the only motive behind social network formation and growth. Refraining from making such an assumption has allowed researchers to focus on structural properties or tendencies within networks, without seeking to explain them in terms of actor rationality. Equally, though, and more important for us, moving away from explaining social network behavior narrowly in terms of rational action provokes us to think about the myriad ways that culture – norms, values, local attitudes and beliefs, cognitive frames, powerful symbols, conversation, and so on – can affect how specific social networks are formed and develop. Taking that step entails adopting a healthy sensitivity to local context and meaning in networks research.
Nodes/actors can be categorized in various different ways. One key structural property of nodes is centrality, and, for the moment, especially degree centrality. This is a measure of the number of connections a given node has to other nodes.2 More central nodes have more ties, and accordingly they are expected to exert a stronger influence on network formation and development. People with many friends are likely to account disproportionately for the spread of tastes and fashions, for example. And a word that appears frequently in a given text – say, the word “security” in a State of the Union address – probably contributes disproportionally to the text’s meaning, and influences the meaning of the words adjacent to it.3
It is usually also important to consider substantive attributes of entities in social networks.4 Such attributes may be relatively light on cultural content. Recording actors’ physical attributes like height or body mass index or vocal pitch seems pretty devoid of cultural significance – except, say, in the context of speed dating in America (McFarland et al. 2013), where tall men are considered more desirable than short men, heavier women seem to be less choosy about dates, and rising pitch in one’s voice is understood to connote engagement in a conversation. You catch my drift here, I hope: these physiological attributes frequently carry culture-specific meanings, and so connection to actors possessing them may be valued or despised accordingly. I don’t mean to say these are entirely culturally constituted attributes in the way a preference for country music is, or living in Dumbo, but these meanings are important to consider when we analyze and interpret issues like who is most active or most connected in a network – indeed, who contributes the most to making the network.
While the notion of node is flexible, the notion of tie or edge is even more so. A tie can record almost anything: a kind of social relation (for example, marriage, friendship or admiration), or shared membership in a group, or a flow of resources (trade, gift exchange, migration, favors, advice), or communication (talking together, following on Twitter), or proximity (sharing a neighborhood, words semantically joined in a sentence). Furthermore, while we commonly think of networks as a set of things (actors) tied through connections, as if nodes were subjects and edges were actions or activities predicated of them, we may reverse that: we could think of activities as the nodes and people as the edges connecting them.5 Being a bit imaginative like this allows us, for one thing, to avoid thinking of “physical” networks as primary, and culture, as the thing that flows through them, as secondary, or “added” afterwards. The entities – the actors – may actually be (in fact, almost always are) constituted culturally through flows of activities that generate identities (White 2008). Thus, the “hardware versus software” analogy I posed in chapter 1 can quickly break down!
There are several issues to consider concerning the general properties of ties. First, network analysts typically store information about ties by grouping them into types of tie, or relations. Any given set of nodes may be connected via different relations: for example, a set of college friends may be connected by major, and/or by classes attended together, and/or by shared dorm space, and/or by exercising together, and/or by membership in clubs, and/ or, eventually, by marriage and possibly having kids together! We don’t want to jumble up information on these different relations as if they all did the same work and meant the same thing. Because they mean different things, the network patterns we expect for each relation among one set of actors are quite likely to differ, too.
Second, there is the issue of how different relations may relate to each other. Maybe roommates do exercise together; that is an empirical question. But, often enough, not only how specific types of tie go together in actuality, but whether they can or should go together conceptually, is a function of cultural norms and expectations. For instance, in some societies people are expected to go into business with their family members; then, it is not an accidental confluence of relations. Both the roommates example and the business partners example describe overlapping types of tie, which network analysts refer to as multiplexity. However, although both are cases of multiplexity, it should be of special concern to us whether particular instances of multiplexity are culturally mandated (or culturally prohibited), so we can understand better the cultural norms and processes that generate particular network structures.
Consider also that humans are exceptionally adept at stitching different types of ties together, across different domains, to forge connections. For example, I might ask my sister to speak to her neighbor about the neighbor’s boss’s used car I want to buy. Vedran found a new drummer for his band by talking to a guy on my pick-up basketball team that used to work as a booking agent. Derek chatted with a guy on a train in Europe who went to school with his former girlfriend’s dance instructor. And so on. Sometimes those ties are formed for utilitarian reasons; sometimes, as in the last example, they simply support everyday human sociability. Regardless, much of the way our social world works lies in how different relations are utilized skillfully in combination. Note this is not about overlapping relations, but chains of relations. Some combinations are very common. For example, a husband’s brother is so commonly turned to for various things that we have a name for that compound relationship: brother-in-law. In patronage-based political systems, some people – bosses – have power precisely because they can connect people they know on one dimension with people they know on another.6 Yet some combinations of relations might be very hard to enact. Again, cultural expectations will shape the possibility of these tie combinations .7
Finally, one of the most important dimensions with which social network analysts have sought to classify ties and relations is the distinction between weak ties and strong ties, famously articulated by Mark Granovetter (1973). According to Granovetter himself, as well as according to a kind of common “wisdom” among network analysts, a strong tie generally denotes some combination of time spent together, emotional intensity and/or intimacy, and reciprocity. The term “weak tie,” by contrast, presumably refers to social ties that involve less time spent together, or less recurrent interaction (Uzzi 1996), as well as less intensity of feeling. Classically, we talk of family ties or business partnerships as strong ties. On the other side, “acquaintance” is the consummate example of a weak tie. However, as many networks scholars have noted (see, for example, Kadushin 2012: 31), conclusively distinguishing a weak from a strong tie in substantive terms is challenging. We may have family members we have known a long time, but never see. We may see people like our hair stylist or our local grocery store cashier more frequently than some friends, yet feel little connection to them. Further, strength and weakness may be directional: a student may feel strongly connected to and influenced by a particular professor, while as far as the professor is concerned, the student is just another face in the classroom.8 So, in the first place, it is necessary to justify carefully our coding of network ties as weak or strong in terms of prevailing cultural understandings, including the understanding of relations from the standpoint of the participants. I shall have more to say about the value of weak ties later in this chapter.
Ego-Networks
As we begin to explore the embedding of any given node in any kind of network, we may start by considering ego-networks. An ego-network is a network composed of a focal actor, plus all of the others (alters) to whom he or she is tied or with whom he or she interacts, plus all of the ties among those alters. Ego-networks deliberately sample on particular actors, rather than trying to incorporate everyone’s ties to each other and then analyze that overall structure. One might consider such restrictive sampling to be a shortcoming, but ego-network analysis has a different object in mind than the study of whole networks (which we will come to shortly). We may want to distinguish between actors in terms of the number of alters with whom they interact, then explore both the causes and consequences of such differences. We often want to know whether people’s friends are each other’s friends, or whether people divide their networks of acquaintances into non-overlapping sectors. In turn, we are interested in whether those non-overlapping sectors represent culturally distinct groups – say the distinction between my group of friends who are fanatical about Beethoven the composer and my group of friends who are fanatical about Beethoven the dog. Finally, we are interested in knowing what kinds of communications and what kinds of support are provided in these personal networks. Such communication and support depend on our understandings of what persons in particular positions vis-à-vis each other are expected to provide. The structure of ego-networks may also depend on broader cultural factors, such as changing perceptions of the value of being or living alone (McPherson et al. 2006), or differences in national cultures (Fischer and Shavit 1995; Dávid et al. 2016), or involvement in specific cultural activities like video game play (Shen and Chen 2015).
The Dyad
Now we move our attention beyond actors/nodes to the next higher level, specifically to the dyad, one of the fundamental building blocks of networks (Rivera et al. 2010). Any pair of nodes in a network, whether directly connected or not, can be considered a dyad. However, we are usually especially interested in dyads in which some tie exists between the nodes. Ties within dyads, when they exist, may be undirected (such as “being neighbors,” or perhaps “collaborators”) or directed (such as influence or advice ties). Some directed ties, as in the diffusion processes we visit in chapter 4, are asymmetric (arcs); others, like exchanging gifts, are often mutual or reciprocal. While we can try to sort different types of ties into these “structural” or “morphological” categories based on their inherent properties (for example, it’s very hard to live next door to someone without them being able to describe themselves as living next door to you, too), often we find that whether or not particular relations are directed or undirected, and whether they are one-directional or mutual, are matters of cultural context and interpretation. For instance, nothing inherently requires us to reciprocate for Christmas gifts received, but cultural norms strongly work upon us to do so. Certain favors – helping a stranger change a tire, for example, or giving advice – often imply that the favor ought not to be directly reciprocated, but “paid forward” instead. Again, this is not structurally inherent in the tie, yet it can be definitional to the tie as it is understood in its cultural context. It is almost always useful, and frequently vital, to think carefully about the cultural understandings that constitute and animate the various social relations we analyze and visualize through social network methods.9 When we fail to do so and focus too excitedly on discovering certain network structural properties,10 we can easily interpret those properties in a decontextualized way that
