Introduction: Network Perspectives - Content Meets Structure

When we try to understand human behavior or beliefs, we might be tempted to either see these as the outcome of an individual’s free choice or as the result of individual characteristics. However, humans have a need for social contact (i.e., to interact with others; Crosier, Webster, and Dillon, 2012). This social component offers a third type of explanation for why people behave in a specific way or why they tend to hold a specific belief. That is that their behavioral decisions and beliefs are linked to how they are connected to others. The core idea of this perspective is that social relations impact our behavior and shape our beliefs and views on life, while at the same time, we might be selective about who we form relationships with. Such a relational perspective might not only be useful to explain individual behavior and beliefs but might also help explain how cooperation and coordination come about between people, organizations, or even nations. Since organizations and nations are made up of individuals, their coordinations can, in essence, be seen as complex aggregations of individual behavior. Hence, a social network analytical perspective might not only help explain individual behavior but also those of organizations and countries. Central to this third type of explanation is the idea of looking at the world like a social network. This easy_social_sciences issue consists of four papers that take up this idea and highlight different research areas from a social network perspective

Einführung: Soziale Netzwerkperspektiven - Inhalt trifft auf Struktur

Wenn wir versuchen, menschliches Verhalten oder menschliche Überzeugungen zu verstehen, könnten wir entweder versucht sein, diese als das Ergebnis der freien Entscheidung eines Individuums zu betrachten, oder als das Resultat von individuellen Eigenschaften. Jedoch haben Menschen ein Bedürfnis nach sozialem Kontakt (d.h. nach Interaktion mit anderen; Crosier, Webster, & Dillon, 2012). Diese soziale Komponente bietet einen dritten Erklärungsansatz dafür, warum Menschen sich auf eine bestimmte Art und Weise verhalten oder warum sie zu einer bestimmten Überzeugung tendieren. Das heißt, dass ihre verhaltensbezogenen Entscheidungen und Überzeugungen davon abhängen, wie sie mit anderen Menschen in Verbindung stehen. Im Mittelpunkt eines solchen Ansatzes stehen also die sozialen (Netzwerk-)Beziehungen, die Menschen unterhalten. Der zentrale Gedanke dieser Sichtweise ist, dass sich soziale Beziehungen auf unser Verhalten auswirken und unsere Überzeugungen und Ansichten über das Leben prägen, während wir gleichzeitig selektiv entschieden können, mit wem wir Beziehungen eingehen. Eine solche beziehungsorientierte Perspektive könnte nicht nur nützlich sein, um individuelles Verhalten und Überzeugungen zu erklären, sondern auch, um zu erklären, wie Kooperation und Koordination zwischen Menschen, Organisationen oder sogar Nationen zustande kommen. Da Organisationen und Nationen aus Individuen bestehen, können ihre Aktivitäten im Wesentlichen als komplexe Aggregate des individuellen Verhaltens betrachtet werden. Daher kann eine netzwerkanalytische Perspektive nicht nur helfen, das Verhalten von Individuen, sondern auch von Organisationen und Ländern zu erklären. Im Mittelpunkt dieses dritten Erklärungsansatzes steht die Idee, die Welt als soziales Netzwerk zu begreifen. Diese Ausgabe von easy_social_sciences besteht aus vier Beiträgen, die diese Idee aufgreifen und verschiedene Forschungsbereiche aus der Perspektive sozialer Netzwerke beleuchten

Group differences in reciprocity, multiplexity and exchange:measures and application

Local forces structure social networks. One major and widely researched local force is reciprocity, often assumed to work homogeneously across actors-i. e., all actors are equally subject to the same level of force towards reciprocity. Other local forces, like multiplexity and exchange, are also often assumed to apply equally to different actors. But social theory provides us with ample arguments why such forces might be stronger in some subsets of actors than others, or why such forces might affect intergroup ties more than intragroup ties. In this paper we introduce standard measures to capture these group specific forces towards reciprocity, multiplexity, and exchange. All the measures control for differential tendencies of actors to initiate ties of various types. We also introduce a procedure by which differences in the strength of these forces between groups and subgroups can be statistically evaluated. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V

Audience mobility and patterns of concert attendance: a social network approach to the study of omnivorousness

In this paper we use a social network approach to analyze audience mobility and patterns of attendance of concert audiences in and between institutions, based on ideas developed by Agneessens and Roose (JMS, 2008). We want to contribute two things to the existing literature. First, we analyze if and to what extent people combine concerts of the same or different music genres, thereby offering an alternative approach to the conceptualization and measurement of omnivorousness. We probe into what characteristics are associated with a univorous or a more omnivorous attendance pattern. We expect age and educational attainment to be related to a broader musical taste, i.e. to a higher chance of attending concerts of different genres. Second, from a marketing-the-arts perspective, such an approach gives insight into the effectiveness of promotional strategies. Does a concert hall that aims at a loyal audience indeed attract people who only attend concerts of that house, whatever the genre? Or are genre boundaries more pertinent than institutional loyalty when it comes to attending different concerts

Where do intra-organizational advice relations come from? The role of informal status and social capital in social exchange

Social status and social capital frameworks are used to derive competing hypotheses about the emergence and structure of advice relations in organizations. Although both approaches build on a social exchange framework, they differ in their behavioral micro-foundations. From a status perspective, advice giving is a means to generate prestige, whereas asking advice decreases one's relative standing. At a structural level these motivations are expected to result in an overrepresentation of non-reciprocal dyads and non-cyclical triadic structures in the advice network, as well as in active advice seekers being unlikely to be approached for advice, especially by active advice givers. From a social capital perspective, advice seeking creates obligations for the advice seeker. At the structural level, this results in an overrepresentation of reciprocal dyads and cyclical triads, and active advice seekers to be unpopular as targets of advice seeking, especially for active advice givers. Analyses of four waves of a longitudinal sociometric study of 57 employees of a Dutch Housing Corporation provide partial support for both approaches. In line with the social capital perspective, we find reciprocal advice relations to be overrepresented at the dyad level. Results at the triad level support the social status arguments, according to which high status individuals will avoid asking advice from low status individuals. The implications for macro-structural properties of intra-organizational advice network are discussed. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Asking Social Network Questions: A Quality Assessment of Different Measures. Metodoloski zvezki

Abstract Research findings indicate that different types of social relations have an important influence on the performance of employees in organisations. This paper focuses on a comparison of different methods for acquiring information on advice, cooperation, friendship, adversarial and superficial networks in knowledge organisations. We investigate the applicability of three distinct measurement methods to acquire different kinds of complete network data by means of the recognition method. Data were collected in a small governmental organisation consisting of knowledge workers. First, employees were presented a short description of a specific situation in which social relations with their colleagues might play a significant role. They had to indicate if (or how often) this specific situation occurred with each of the colleagues. Second, respondents were asked to indicate whether a specific relational concept (in this case 'advice' or 'friendship') applied to each of their relations with their colleagues. Third, we provided respondents with four semantic differentials (e.g. distrust-trust) on which they needed to position their relation with the other employees. Whether these different measurement instruments capture distinct aspects of the relation between employees, or whether they measure the same underlying concepts, is one of the major concerns of this paper. The aim of this paper is twofold. First of all, we want to know to what extent these different measurement instruments overlap. Second, we would like to find out to what degree these different methods as a whole give us conceptually different and complementary information. To the extent that items are correlated within one method and between methods we need to investigate which of these different instruments is best suited for our content related purposes. The criteria used for selecting the most appropriate method are minimal item non-response -i.e. from the viewpoint of measuring complete networksand maximum relational diversity with a minimum of questions

Geodesic based centrality: Unifying the local and the global.

A variety of node-level centrality measures, including purely structural measures (such as degree and closeness centrality) and measures incorporating characteristics of actors (such as the Blau’s measure of heterogeneity) have been developed to measure a person’s access to resources held by others. Each of these node-level measures can be placed on a continuum depending on whether they focus only on ego’s direct contacts (e.g. degree centrality and Blau’s measure of heterogeneity), or whether they also incorporate connections to others at longer distances in the network (e.g. closeness centrality or betweenness centrality). In this paper we propose generalized measures, where a tuning parameter δ regulates the relative impact of resources held by more close versus more distant others. We first show how, when a specific δ is chosen degree-centrality and reciprocal closeness centrality are two specific instances of this more general measure. We then demonstrate how a similar approach can be applied to node-level measures that incorporate attributes. When more or less weight is given to other nodes at longer distances with specific characteristics, a generalized measure of resource-richness and a generalized measure for diversity among one’s connections can be obtained (following Blau’s measure of heterogeneity). Finally, we show how this approach can also be applied to betweenness centrality to focus on more local (ego) betweenness or global (Freeman) betweenness. The importance of the choice of δ is illustrated on some classic network datasets