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necessarily, relational. An axiom of the social network approach to understanding social
interaction is that social phenomena should be primarily conceived and investigated
through the properties of relations between and within units, instead of the properties of
these units themselves. Thus, one common criticism of social network theory is
that individual agency is often ignored although this may not be the case in practice
(see agent-based modeling). Precisely because many different types of relations,
singular or in combination, form these network configurations, network analytics are
useful to a broad range of research enterprises. In social science, these fields of study
include, but are not limited to anthropology, biology, communication
studies, economics, geography, information science, organizational studies, social
psychology, sociology, and sociolinguistics.
History
In the late 1890s, both Émile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tönnies foreshadowed the idea
of social networks in their theories and research of social groups. Tönnies argued that
social groups can exist as personal and direct social ties that either link individuals who
share values and belief (Gemeinschaft, German, commonly translated as "community")
or impersonal, formal, and instrumental social links (Gesellschaft, German, commonly
translated as "society"). Durkheim gave a non-individualistic explanation of social facts,
arguing that social phenomena arise when interacting individuals constitute a reality that
can no longer be accounted for in terms of the properties of individual actors. Georg
Simmel, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, pointed to the nature of networks
and the effect of network size on interaction and examined the likelihood of interaction
in loosely knit networks rather than groups.
Major developments in the field can be seen in the 1930s by several groups in
psychology, anthropology, and mathematics working independently. In psychology, in
the 1930s, Jacob L. Moreno began systematic recording and analysis of social
interaction in small groups, especially classrooms and work groups (see sociometry).
In anthropology, the foundation for social network theory is the theoretical
and ethnographic work of Bronislaw Malinowski, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, and Claude
Lévi-Strauss. A group of social anthropologists associated with Max Gluckman and
the Manchester School, including John A. Barnes, J. Clyde Mitchell and Elizabeth Bott
Spillius, often are credited with performing some of the first fieldwork from which
network analyses were performed, investigating community networks in southern Africa,
India and the United Kingdom. Concomitantly, British anthropologist S. F. Nadel codified
a theory of social structure that was influential in later network analysis. In sociology, the
early (1930s) work of Talcott Parsons set the stage for taking a relational approach to
understanding social structure. Later, drawing upon Parsons' theory, the work of
sociologist Peter Blauprovides a strong impetus for analyzing the relational ties of social
units with his work on social exchange theory.
By the 1970s, a growing number of scholars worked to combine the different tracks and
traditions. One group consisted of sociologist Harrison White and his students at
the Harvard University Department of Social Relations. Also independently active in the
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