Epistemic and methodological aspects of network analysis
| Author | Codrina Sandru |
| Position | Department of Social Assistance and Communication, <I>Transilvania</I> University of Braşov. |
| Pages | 63-74 |
Page 63
"Society today can be understood only if we can think it as a relationship" (Donati, 1991, p.12). This is the main proposition of the relational paradigm that attempts to overcome specific polarities of sociological thinking: part - whole, static -dynamic, action - system, understanding - explanation, etc. Instead, the relational paradigm proposes a unified vision on society, with the center concept of social relation.
Relationship becomes the primary concept in sociology, an undefined and axiomatic concept, a sui generis reality that is not reducible to any particular factor and is not produced or derivative of any other entity. From a philosophical point of view, the relationship is a primary category not to be explained and it is always present as a constituent fact of reality and consciousness.
Relational sociology is an attempt to unite man as object and subject, subjectivity and structure, social system and social action, considering that the relationship is reciprocal action, and the system is a set of relationships. Relational paradigm intends to provide a unified and non-dual vision on the social.
The social is made up of social relationships, and they have a dual nature: on the one hand, they are symbolically mediated, that they are provided with significance by social actors. On the other hand, they have a constant tendency to be structured in printed forms, i.e. to become institutionalized. Social relations are at the same time, action and function, inter- subjectivity and organized structure.
Along with the concept of social relationship, the structure occupies a central position in the relational approach. Some authors even use the structural Page 64analysis as a synonym for network analysis (Wellman, 1995).
The concept of structure is taken from the structural-functionalist approach, but the relational paradigm gave it a different meaning, making abstraction of roles, status and functions. The idea is not to overlook the importance of the concept of function in social theory, but to guide the analysis towards relational forms as subject separately.
The meaning of the structure in the network analysis was given, in a formal sense, by Simmel and Von Wiese: the whole fabric of human interaction that is mutually interdependent (Chiesi, 1980). Social structure represents models of relations established between different social units. It can be plotted as a network: a set of nodes (individuals, groups, communities) linked through various relationships.
The social structure can be defined as a "persistent pattern of social relations between different social positions" (Lauman and Pappi, 1976 apud Piselli, 1995, p. XLIII). In this perspective, the role of the sociologist is to analyze models of stable relations between different parts of the social system in order to discover the effects of these models on the behavior of individuals. Social behaviors and actions are performed "only in relation to the position of actors in the social structure" (Piselli, 1995, p. XLIV).
Based on these assumptions, two directions have developed in the American sociology: one covering the structure of interpersonal communication (family, friendship, community), and the other one studying the structural models of macro- social processes (relations of power, business, marketing) (Piselli, 1995).
The relational paradigm has a dynamic vision of social relationship. Any relation is seen as a transaction, not as a static link between inert units (Emirbayer, 1997). At micro level, individual identities and personal interests are not pre-formed, but only build in transactional process, so in social relations. At macro level, world states are not seen as well-defined and autonomous units, with boundaries drawn firmly, but as "many social and spatial networks of power that overlap and intersect each other" (Mann, 1986 apud Emirbayer, 1997, p. 295).
Relationists consider that the approaches that assign qualities to the social entities based of their nature, without regard to the relational context in which these entities are located, are inadequate. The relational paradigm offers an alternative to positivist thinking built on categories and variables, aiming to "assign attributes to entities not under their assumed identities, but defining this identity as a relational reality of an entity-in-a-context" (Donati, 1991, p. 14).
The relational paradigm offers an alternative for the phenomenological approach too, considering that it is wrong because it neglects relationships, reducing them to intersubjectivity and considering the social relations as a product of the intersubjectivity.
A social relation is, at the same time, objective (historical-concrete) and subjective (equipped with sense). The analysis of social relations have to capture both the objective dimensions of social, which are independent of the subject and represent the system properties and the subjective dimensions which are dependent on the social agent, representing the conditions and characteristics of intersubjective communication. Social phenomenon is a relational fact and a mutual involvement of subjects. Because of their interaction, they give rise to social forms of aggregation at different levels of institutionalization.
From this point of view, we should take into account in any research the following sentence: the phenomenon is born in aPage 65relational context, it is conducted in a relational context and it gives rise to a relational system. "It is not fair to say that sociology studies social relations between facts [...], but it studies social facts as relations" (Donati, 1991, p. 71).
From an epistemological point of view, the relational paradigm tries not to overlook the subject (vital world, autonomous individual), nor its social context. From the methodological point of view, it proposes to analyze social realities through the network model, and pragmatically speaking it sees social interventions as management of relations.
Elements of relational thinking can be found in many works of classical or modern philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Hume, Locke, Hegel, etc.), but the relational paradigm, as a distinct sociological approach, was developed only in the twentieth century (Donati, 1991, Bianco, 1996).
The founder of this approach is the German sociologist Georg Simmel. He said for the first time in sociology that social reality is fundamentally relational, in other words, relationship should not be reduced to other entities. For Simmel, a phenomenon is social even if it expresses a particular characteristic: to be interaction, interdependence or reciprocity effect. No social phenomenon is the emanation of a subject or a system a-priori constituted. The social is relationship par excellence. (Donati, 1991).
Thus, a social unit, or a phenomenon, or an action can be defined only in terms of their relations with other phenomena. Essence of things lies not in the thing itself, but in the relations of interdependence between things. According to Simmel, these relations can be of different types: spatial relationships of neighborhood and removal, teleological relationships, causal relationships such as cause-effect, functional part - whole ones, etc.
Even if Simmel is criticized for having built an abstract sociology, as a "geometry of the social world", where he gave much attention to forms (Chiesi, 1980), his formalism had a great influence on the sociological thinking.
On Simmel's footsteps, Leopold von Wiese tried to build a bridge between formal theoretical system of the simmelian sociology and the American empirical sociology that developed in the early twentieth century (Chiesi, 1980).
In Leopold von Wiese's view, sociology has to study the links or connections between people, measurable by their distance and described as constellations of relationships.
Relations between people "would figure that a constellation seemingly impenetrable of lines starting from points (people) who are at the ends of the field. It is about how to order this fabric and to explain how these numerous links make possible the civilian life... So, the inter-human is nothing but a great deal of mutual ties between people and variables. Events taking place in this sphere, which I call social processes, are events in witch people are more closely related to each other or further from each other." (Von Wiese, 1968, p. 266). Leopold von Wiese declared he was optimistic about the possibilities of measuring the social space, although he was aware that the difficulties of establishing valid units were very serious.
Based on these formalist concepts, the network analysis has developed in the first half of the twentieth century, on the following three directions: 1) the sociometry, 2) the British anthropological school from Manchester and 3) thePage 66American school of sociology and psychology of Harvard.
Sociometry was promoted by Jacob Levi Moreno, a Romanian-born American psychosociologist, in the '30s last century, in his work called ``Who Shall Survive?". Sociometry proposed the measurement of...
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