Linton C. Freeman, ,The Development of Social Network Analysis: A Study in the Sociology of Science (2004) Empirical Press,Vancouver, BC.
✍ Scribed by H. Russell Bernard
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2005
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 74 KB
- Volume
- 27
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0378-8733
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
From 1960 to 1975, 20 articles about social network analysis were listed in Sociological Abstracts. From 1990 to 2005, the number was over 3000. No one today is more equipped to explain how this happened than Linton C. Freeman.
Freeman divides the history of social network analysis (SNA from here on) into four eras: (1) everything up to the end of the 1920s; (2) the 1930s; (3) the 30 years from about 1940 to 1969; and (4) the modern era, beginning when Harrison White (who had moved to Harvard in 1963) began producing the students who would become a who's-who of modern SNA.
For every era, Freeman's rhetoric is devoid of disciplinary chauvinism. He draws from sociology, anthropology, psychology, mathematics, and physics and shows how it all came together, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by sheer accident, to become the international, multidisciplinary band of scholars who call themselves social network analysts today.
In the Introduction, Freeman establishes the organizing principle of the book. Modern SNA, he says, is an organized paradigm for research and is defined by four features:
(1) it is "motivated by a structural intuition" and focused on ties between actors rather than on attributes of actors;
(2) it is based on systematic collection of data about those ties;
(3) it relies on graphics; and (4) mathematical/computational tools to make sense of the welter of information about all those ties (p. 3).
As a true paradigm for research, in the Kuhnian sense of the word, modern SNA is a normal and cumulative science (p. 6). The rest of the book is devoted to showing how this happened.