Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The concept of networks involves relational thinking. What links people together across time and space? How are things and people connected and embedded economically, politically, and culturally? In what ways do goods and information and capital flow and why are they channeled down particular vertices and nodes? The network is a useful way of thinking about cultural links, institutional formations, and general ideas about separation and connectedness; these socio-cultural analyses can then be successfully articulated with theories of the economy (Thrift and Olds, 1996). Thinking in terms of networks forces us to theorize socioeconomic processes as interwined and mutually constitutive.Networks, furthermore, provide a useful way of thinking about economic relations that don't rely on static, bounded configurations such as the region or the nation, yet also don't ascribe everything to random flows. As Thrift and Olds (1996, p. 333) write: “The network serves as an analytical compromise, in the best sense of the word, between the fixities of bounded region metaphor and the fluidities of the flow metaphor.” It is helpful in analyzing the interconnections between things, in tracing links and making translations between objects and people that otherwise are often depicted as pure, separate, and distinct.Networks of ethnicity are relational social and economic ties based on various commonalities ... log in or subscribe to read full text