The math of social networks

A social network is constituted by a number of units (nodes) that are connected to each other by a defined relationship -- for example, "x cites y", "x sends 5 email messages a week to y", "x and y belong to an organization in common." There are a few wrinkles -- the units may be persons, organizations, cities, journal articles, or other types of entities; the relationships may be uni-directional or bi-directional; and the linking relationships may represent categorical relationships or intensity relationships. "x and y are friends" is a bi-directional relationship; "x and y are close friends" is a bi-directional relationship recording intensity.Some of the basic questions about a social network are easy to formulate but difficult to assess....

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Posted in: CAT_collective action,networks

Quiet politics

image: Conspiracy, Edward Biberman (cover illustration, Quiet Politics)Pepper Culpepper's Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate Control in Europe and Japan sheds some very interesting light on one key question in contemporary western democracies: how do corporations and business organizations so often succeed in creating a legislative and regulatory environment that largely serves their interests?  And, for that matter, why do they sometimes fail spectacularly in doing so, even while spending oceans of money in the effort to influence public policy? The book is a careful comparative study of the development of corporate governance laws and institutions in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Japan.  It offers special...

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Posted in: capitalism,CAT_institutions,inequality,power

Inequalities and the ascendant right

The playing field seems to keep tilting further against ordinary people in this country -- poor people, hourly workers, low-paid service workers, middle-class people with family incomes in the $60-80K range, uninsured people, ....  75% of American households have household incomes below $80,000; the national median was $44,389 in 2005.  Meanwhile the top one percent of Americans receive 17% of total after-tax income.  And the rationale offered by the right to justify these increasing inequalities keeps shifting over time: free enterprise ideology, trickle-down economics, divisive racial politics, and irrelevant social issues, for example.Here is the trajectory of US income by quintile since 1965 (link); essentially no change...

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Posted in: CAT_policy,democracy,inequality,power

Social networks as aggregators

We think of social phenomena as "relational" in some important respect. Individuals contribute to social outcomes through structured and dynamic relationships with other individuals. So outcomes are not just heaps of aggregated individual behavior; rather, they are the filigreed result of interlinked, coordinated, competitive and sometimes unintended actions of people who have intentional and structural relationships to each other. And we think of these relationships, often, in terms of the metaphors and analytics of social "networks." So it is worthwhile giving some thought to how the machinery of social network theory can help us in better understanding the ways that social processes unfold. Here is a nice passage from Mario Diani's introduction...

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Posted in: analytical sociology,CAT_collective action,microfoundations,mobilization,networks

Scenario-based projections of social processes

As we have noted in previous posts, social outcomes are highly path-dependent and contingent (link, link, link, link). This implies that it is difficult to predict the consequences of even a single causal intervention within a complex social environment including numerous actors -- say, a new land use policy, a new state tax on services, or a sweeping cap-and-trade policy on CO2 emissions. And yet policy changes are specifically designed and chosen in order to bring about certain kinds of outcomes. We care about the future; we adopt policies to improve this or that feature of the future; and yet we have a hard time providing a justified forecast of the consequences of the policy.This difficulty doesn't only affect policy choices; it also pertains...

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Posted in: agency,analytical sociology,CAT_methodology,localism,prediction

Academic freedom and faculty email

There have been several efforts recently by partisan groups in Michigan and Wisconsin to gain access to faculty email messages on subjects that fall within the scope of the faculty member's research or personal political opinions. These groups have made use of state Freedom of Information laws, on the basis that faculty members are "state officials" and their communications are therefore "business records" of the university. This is an alarming intrusion into the zone of academic and personal freedom of the faculty member, and it threatens to create a chilling effect on the faculty member's ability to freely communicate his or her ideas with colleagues without fear of retaliation or punishment, or premature disclosure of ideas not yet fully developed. It is vital that universities think very...

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Posted in: academic freedom,CAT_policy,privacy

University as a causal structure

An earlier post laid out a case for a modest social holism, in the form of a set of arguments for the idea that there are social forces and causal powers that are relatively autonomous from the features of the individuals who constitute them (link). These ideas parallel some of those offered by Dave Elder-Vass that were discussed in a recent post. I hold that this modest holism is compatible with the ideas of methodological localism (link) and the requirement that social causes require microfoundations (link, link). At the same time, it helps make sense of the fairly obvious point that social institutions, norms, and linguistic communities exercise powerful influence over the thoughts and behaviors of individuals.The causal processes linking...

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Posted in: CAT_institutions,education,habitus,institutions,microfoundations

Structures and structuration

Several recent posts have focused on new thinking about how to characterize "agency". Much of that thinking is aimed at dissolving the distinction between agency and structure. So what remains to be said about "structure"? Has the structure side of the debate developed much in the past decade or so?One of the important exponents of a structure-centered approach to social theory is Anthony Giddens. His 1979 book, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis, is one place where his views on structure are expressed. He separates himself from earlier versions of "structuralism," including Saussure and Levi-Strauss; but he advocates for the reality of social structures and the methodological appropriateness...

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Posted in: agency,analytical sociology,CAT_structure,microfoundations

Picturing social consciousness

Here is a schematic effort at capturing some of the main factors involved in the socially constituted agent. There are the "influencers" that impact the development of the person and his/her "social brain" -- that is, the neurophysiological infrastructure we have evolved through our evolutionary history for gaining knowledge, representing the world, interacting with other people, etc. I've singled out media, family, school, religion, peers, popular culture, work, and the military as primary social and cultural influencers. And the red arrows indicate the schematic notion that these institutions and structured experiences affect the development of multiple aspects of the social agent's mental system. The idea is that each of these institutions...

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Posted in: CAT_cognition,social cognition

Studying the socially constituted agent

We think we know quite a bit about being an "agent". It is to be an intervener in the world: a being capable of changing things around him or her through physical action; a subjectivity (consciousness, feelings, thoughts, desires); a user of language for thought and for communication. We also think we are well prepared when it comes to recognizing the diversity of the subjectivities on which agents act and live. We are familiar with important cultural differences; we know that people have different sets of values and commitments; we know that people from different backgrounds see and experience the world differently. Perhaps even, like Benjamin Whorf, we may think that different language systems and grammars give their users fundamentally...

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Posted in: analytical sociology,CAT_agency

Hume as historian

David Hume is probably the greatest British philosopher of his century or the next one. He set the framework for empiricist theories of knowledge, causation, and induction, as well as providing trenchant writings about religion, psychology, and the self. And he appears to have been an appealing personality as well, with the courage of his convictions when it came to his atheism and his stocism in the face of impending death.So he was a truly brilliant and original philosopher. But he was best known during his lifetime for his million-word history of England, The History of England, Volume I (1754-62), in six long volumes. The work covers Britain from the Saxon kings through the Glorious Revolution of 1688. As such, it intersects to...

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Posted in: CAT_history