Week 5 Flashcards
Sociology of sociology
Critical self-examination of one’s own position within the social world, particularly in relation to knowledge production.
The three biases of Bourdieu’s reflexivity
- Social factors: Social characteristics of the researcher.
- The field dynamics of the academic world: Power relations/dynamic, capital volume, funding.
- The intellectualist bias: Projecting how people should think onto those being researched.
Social network
A set of socially-relevant nodes connected by one or more relations.
Nodes
Or network members, are the units that are connected by the relations whose patterns we study. These units are commonly persons or organizations, but in principle any units that can be connected to other units can be studied as nodes.
Boundary specification problem
Knowing which individuals to consider as researchers can be tricky especially because many network analysts avoid group-based approaches to understanding the social world.
Three approaches to addressing the boundary specification problem
- Position-based approach: Considers those actors who are members of an organization or hold particular formally-defined positions to be network members and all others would be excluded.
- Event-based approach: Considers those actors who had participated in key events believed to define the population.
- Relation-based approach: Begins with a small set of nodes deemed to be within the population of interest and then expands to include others sharing particular types of relations with those seed nodes as well as with any nodes previously added.
Four broad categories of relations
- Similarities: Occur when two nodes share the kinds of attributes frequently studied in variable-based approach.
- Social relations: Include kinships or other types of commonly-defined role relations; affective ties, which are based on network members’ feelings for one another; or cognitive awareness.
- Interactions: Behavior-based ties.
- Flows: Relations based on exchanges or transfers between nodes.
Relations vs. attributes
Sorting individuals based on attributes treats causation as something that comes from within the individuals, within common attributes acting independently on individuals to produce similar outcomes.
Social network analysists argue that causation is located in the social structure and not on the individual. Instead, people with similar attributes frequently have similar social network positions. Sorting individuals based on relations allows us to see a large number of people acting on one another to shape one another’s actions in ways that create particular outcomes.
Networks vs. Groups
Treating group memberships as having discretely bounded or mutually excessive memberships makes invisible the importance of differing levels of group membership, membership in multiple groups, and cross-cutting ties between groups (groups).
Networks has three advantages:
1. It allows researchers to think of individuals as embedded in groups to varying degrees and thus differentially subject to the opportunities, constraints and influences created by group membership.
2. It allows researchers to examine variations in group structure, determining which groups are more or less cohesive, which are clearly-bounded, and which are more permeable.
3. Leaving open the the questions of cohesion and boundary strength allows researchers to move beyond studying clearly identifiable groups to studying sets of people that would be less easily identifiable as groups but that nonetheless structure social relations.
Relations in a relational context
Social network analysts study patterns of relations, not just relations between pairs. This means that while relations are measured as existing between pair of nodes, understanding the effect and meaning of a tie between two nodes requires taking into account the broader patterns of ties within the network. Assuming that each pair of nodes acts independently hides network processes that are created by larger patters in the network.
Formalist network theories
Primarily concerned with describing the mathematical form of social networks. These theories study the effects of forms, insofar as they are effects on the form itself, and the causes of these forms, insofar as they are structural. Can be studied without the need for empirical data.
Structuralist network theories
Concerned with how patterns of relations can shed light on substantive topics within their disciplines.
What approaches do structuralists take to applying the mantra that relations matter?
- Defining key concepts in network terms.
- Testing an existing theory.
- Looking at network causes of phenomenon of interest: what kinds of social networks lead to particular outcomes.
- Looking at network effects of phenomenon of interest.
Types of ties
- Directed ties: Those that go from one node to another.
- Undirected ties: Those ties that exist between two nodes in no particular direction.
Strength of weak ties theory
- The stronger the ties between two people, the more likely that their social world will overlap. People tend to be homophilous, meaning that they have stronger ties with people who are similar to themselves.
- Bridging ties are a potential source of novel ideas. The idea is that from a bridging tie a person can hear things that are not already circulating among their other friends.
Bridging tie
A bridging tie is a tie that links a person to people who are not connected to their other friends.
Structural holes of theory of social capital
The more structural holes, the more non-redundant ties one has, the more new information.
Habitualization
Any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with an economy of effort and which, ipso facto, is apprehended by its performer as that pattern.
Institutionalization
Whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors.
Objectivation
The process by which the externalized products of human activity attain the character of objectivity.
Externalization
Is the process of making something external, or putting it outside of oneself. This can be done in a number of ways, such as through language, art, or even just by thinking about something.
Legitimation of the means of control
Ways by which the means of control can be explained and justified.
