Wasserman nicely sets the context for this book. Describing the relatively slow progression of network analysis over 60 years, Wasserman notes how "something happened in about 1990. Maybe it was the realization that the social context of actions matter. . .." (viii).
Although organizational scholars have long been aware of the social context (e.g., Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939), it was only in the mid-1980s that user-friendly social network software such as UCINet (Borgatti et al., 2002) combined with the increased power of personal computers to make social network analysis feasible for many organizational researchers. Consequently, social network research has grown markedly in the past 10-20 years (e.g., Borgatti and Foster, 2003;Brass et al., 2004).
This book is an accumulation of the ideas fostered by the considerable previous research of Monge, Contractor and their colleagues. Most notably, Monge and Contractor reach across disciplines to attend to the rapidly accumulating empirical evidence from a variety of fields on the importance of social networks. The authors are experts at integrating research results from a variety of disciplines: communications, sociology, social psychology, and management, as well as a generous sprinkling from the physical sciences. As an organizational researcher who often feels that network researchers in sociology are not aware of the large amount of research being conducted in management, I was pleased to see such a comprehensive review of research on organizational networks. To their credit, the book is a multi-disciplinary undertaking. Perhaps only a title such as Theories of Organizational Networks would suffice, for the actual title of the book, Theories of Communication Networks, is a little misleading. Contrary to what the title might imply, the book does not confine itself to research from the communications discipline.
The book devotes considerable coverage to methodological and statistical techniques. The detailed chapter explaining the logic and use of p* will be particularly useful for learning this statistical technique. Equally helpful is a detailed chapter on the use of Blanche, a computer program that creates dynamic simulations of network evolution. Indeed, much of the book illustrates the use of computational modeling techniques. For those less familiar with computational modeling, this book is a must read. Despite "theories" in the title, much of the book's focus is on methods. Yet, the emphasis on theories ultimately makes the title appropriate. As the authors remind us throughout, these techniques are only as good as the theories that inform the models and statistical analyses.
At the heart of the book is the multi-theory, multilevel model offered by Monge and Contractor as a first-step remedy to three proposed shortcomings of typical network studies.