A social network is any articulated pattern of connections in the social relations of individuals, groups and other collectivities. The relations concerned may be interpersonal relations or they may be economic, political or other social relations. Social network analysis is a mathematical method for describing the structures exhibited by social networks. While it plays a role in the development of theories concerning social networks, social network analysis itself is method and not a theory.
Social network analysis originated in a non-technical form in social psychology and in anthropology, but it has now developed into an advanced area of mathematical applications. From the 1930s many social scientists began to take seriously the metaphors of the ‘web’ or ‘fabric’ of social life as ways of understanding social structure. From these textiles metaphors, aimed at understanding the interweaving and interlocking relations through which social actions were organized, the metaphor of the social network emerged. Radcliffe-Brown in anthropology and Jacob Moreno in social psychology began to employ this metaphor, and in Moreno’s hands it evolved into the new discipline of sociometry and, from there, into group dynamics. It was Moreno who introduced the idea of representing a social network as a diagram (a ‘sociogram’) in which points (representing people) were connected by lines (representing their social relationships).
Radcliffe-Brown’s ideas were taken up by W.Lloyd Warner in his research into American communities and, in particular, in the experimental studies undertaken with Elton Mayo at the Hawthorne electrical plant in Chicago. In these Hawthorne experiments, the informal social relations of work groups were, once again, mapped in diagrammatic form. In Warner’s community studies, such ideas as the ‘clique’ made their first appearance as ways of understanding the formation of cohesive groupings within a social network.
Until the 1950s, however, no distinct methodology of social network analysis existed, and the ideas remained metaphorical and programmatic. A beginning was made in the formalization of the network metaphor in the work of George Homans (1951), who tried to synthesize the results of anthropological and small group research, later recasting these ideas in the framework of exchange theory. It was in the hands of British social anthropologists, however, that the greatest strides were made. John Barnes, Elizabeth Bott and Clyde Mitchell were all associated, to varying degrees, with Max Gluckman’s department at Manchester University and were heavily influenced by Siegfried Nadel. Nadel’s (1957) pioneering work gave voice to earlier works by Barnes, Bott and Mitchell. Barnes (1954) explicitly used the network idea in reporting his fieldwork on a Norwegian fishing village, Bott (1957) analysed kinship and friendship networks of married couples in London, and Mitchell (1969) undertook and supervised research on urban social networks in Central Africa. In the work of Mitchell, such ideas as ‘density’, ‘durability’ and ‘reachability’ were used to analyse the structure of social networks in formal terms.
The major breakthrough in social network analysis occurred in the USA during the 1960s, when a number of sociologists associated with Harrison White at Harvard began to use sophisticated mathematics and computing techniques to examine social networks. Many of these studies concerned interlocking directorships in business, but their studies ranged over such areas as the search for work and the search for illegal abortions (Wellman and Berkowitz 1988). The development of computer technology and the easier availability of computers allowed formal network techniques to be more widely employed in numerous areas, and a number of standard packages are now available. Despite this proliferation of formal and quantitative techniques, much qualitative research on social networks is still undertaken.
The basis of many ideas in network analysis is the mathematical theory of graphs, though ideas from algebraic topology and multidimensional scaling are also employed. Fundamental to the method is the idea of a social network as comprising points connected by lines, and the pattern of lines connecting the points can be represented in a matrix ready for mathematical processing. The principal measures that can be used are those of density, centrality, components, cliques, blocks, and various ideas of social distance. The basic techniques and measures are fully discussed in Scott (1991).
John Scott
University of Essex
References
Barnes, J.A. (1954) ‘Class and committee in a Norwegian island parish’, Human Relations 7.
Bott, E. (1957) Family and Social Network, London.
Homans, G. (1951) The Human Group, London.
Mitchell, J.C. (ed.) (1969) Social Networks in Urban Situations, Manchester.
Nadel, S.F. (1957) The Theory of Social Structure, Glencoe, IL.
Scott, J.P. (1991) Social Network Analysis: A Handbook, London.
Wellman, B. and Berkowitz, S.D. (eds) (1988) Social Structures, Cambridge, UK.
