The Great American University by Jonathan R Cole

Author:Jonathan R Cole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs

Social Structures and Social Networks. Each of the social and behavioral sciences has its own unique angle of vision on behavioral patterns. Psychologists see psychological causes behind the same pattern of behavior that sociologists see as a result of social structural forces. In fact, for decades, sociologists and anthropologists searched for structural theories of behavior in an effort to differentiate their explanations from those that were fundamentally social psychological.

Structural analysis goes back a long way—it was adopted as a mode of explanation by the great anthropologists of the early twentieth century and revived by Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, who tried to construct a theoretical basis for the analysis of social structures in the 1950s. In more recent years, the discoveries of structuralism have been augmented and extended in a new line of theory and research called “network analysis.” One of the leading figures in this area has been Harrison C. White, who taught at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Chicago, and Harvard before moving to the University of Arizona and then Columbia University. White was trained as a physicist, and his mathematical models led the way in developing network theory and analysis. The signature ingredient of his work, and of the work by the extraordinary number of talented students whom he trained, has been his focus on social structures based on patterns of relationships rather than on attributes of individuals. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, social network analysis is perhaps the principal way of examining social structures and organizations in sociology.

If Harrison White is the putative father of “network analysis,” his disciples have done him proud. Mark Granovetter, who received his Ph.D. at Harvard and studied with White, and has taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook as well as at Stanford, used network analysis to demonstrate that people were more apt to find jobs through acquaintances than through close friends. His paper “The Strength of Weak Ties” (1973) was one of the most influential pieces of work in network theory. He demonstrated that in marketing and politics, the use of acquaintances (“weak ties”) enables people to reach audiences that would not be accessible through the use of close friends (“strong ties”). He compares information flow where there is a low-density network (where many lines indicating direct relationships are absent) with information flow in a high-density network (where most of the possible lines among friends are present).

Granovetter wrote that “the weak ties between Ego and his acquaintance” were “a crucial bridge between the two densely knit clumps of close friends,” pointing out that “these clumps would not, in fact, be connected to one another at all were it not for the existence of weak ties.” People without weak ties, he concluded, “will be deprived of information from distant parts of the social system and will be confined to the provincial news and views of their close friends.”19 Weak ties lead to more rapid innovations, to an increased ability to coordinate efforts, and to greater access to resources—and in the case of the labor market, to greater job opportunities.

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