Blackwell Reference Online

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Social scientists have used the metaphor of “social network” for a century to connote complex sets of relationships between members of social systems at all scales, from interpersonal to international. Yet not until the 1950s did they start using the term systematically and self-consciously to denote patterns of ties that cut across the concepts traditionally used by social scientists: bounded groups (e.g., tribes, families) and social categories (e.g., gender, ethnicity). Social network analysis has now moved from being a suggestive metaphor to an analytic approach to a paradigm, with its own theoretical statements, methods, and research findings. It has developed from diverse sources, including anthropological accounts of detribalized urban migrants, surveys of people's long-distance communities, political upheavals, Internet connectivity, and trade relations among nations. The Internet, inherently network-like, has so popularized the approach that Business Week named social network analysis “the hottest new technology” of 2003, and membership in network analysis’ professional organization has doubled in four years. Social network analysts reason from whole to part; from structure to relation to individual; from behavior to attitude. They argue that their social structural explanations have more analytic power than individualistic analyses that do not take relational patterns ... log in or subscribe to read full text