Peter R. Monge - Theories of Communication Networks

Peter R. Monge

Noshir S. Contractor

2003

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Monge, Peter R.

Theories of communication networks / Peter R. Monge, Noshir S.

Contractor.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-19-516036-3; 0-19-516037-1 (pbk.)

1.Social interaction.2Interpersonal communication,3.CommunicationSocial aspects.4.Social perception.I.Contractor, Noshir S., 1959-II.Title.

HM1111 .M664 2002

302dc212002011753

To .....the ties that bind, reciprocated with our love, connected forever.

Janet, Todd, Ryan, and Amber

Thrity and Maria

Social network analysis has been used for the past seventy years to advance research in the social and behavioral sciences. In fact, it was almost exactly seventy years ago from the publication date of this book that Jacob Moreno presented his research on children and isolation to the Medical Society of the State of New York. His use of sociograms, highlighted in his April 1933 presentation, was the first widely recognized application of social network analysis.

Social network analysis progressed slowly, almost linearly, with the developments of sociometry (sociograms, sociomatrices), graph theory, dyads, triads, subgroups, and blockmodels, all of which served to enlighten substantive concerns such as reciprocity, structural balance, transitivity, clusterability, and structural equivalence. By 1980, all of these methods had been adopted by the small band of network analysts.

In the early 1980s, Sunbelt Conferences (now the official Annual Meeting of the International Network for Social Network Analysis) were attended by a core set of about seventy scholars. Total head counts were small; there were very few people on the periphery. It was not hard to trace the evolution of network theories and ideas from professors to students, from one generation to the next. The field of network analysis was even analyzed as a network! Users eventually became analysts, and some even methodologists. But it was easy to know the players and to keep score. It's not hard to follow a field that was the size of about three professional baseball teams!

I had a conversation about ten years ago with the then editor of a respected methodology journal. He told me, basically and with some condescension, that network analysis was just a bunch of indices applied, one at a time, to small data sets. He wanted to know where the "models" were! Network analysis to him was just a bunch of simple, disconnected data analyses, with very little statistics. At that time, this may well have been a valid observation.

But something happened in about 1990. Maybe it was the realization that the social context of actions matter; maybe it was the acknowledgment that epidemics do not progress uniformly through populations (which are almost never homogeneous); maybe it was the slightly controversial view that sex research had to consider sexual networks, even if such networks are just dyads; maybe it was the revelation that organizational network studies are at the heart of management research (roughly one-third of presentations at the Academy of Management annual meetings now have a network perspective). It could also have been that physicists, looking for alternatives to the technical problems of the universe, turned their attention to the Web, small worlds, and metabolic systems, all of which are applications of the paradigm that a few social and behavioral scientists have been working on for many, many years, unbeknownst to many of the physicists now doing network analysis.

The first course in network analysis at the Summer Quantitative Methods Program at the University of Michigan's ICPSR (July 1987) had just three students. This past year, more than forty total (the maximum allowed) were taught in two courses, with another ten on the waiting list. The journal editor I mentioned earlier, along with some colleagues, just recently wrote a clever methodological piece on networks, building on the work of others, particularly statisticians. Clearly, he now thinks network analysis is important! We have seen tremendous growth of interest in our "little field" over the past decade; major breakthroughs over the past ten years, both substantive and methodological, have allowed this paradigm to greatly expand its usefulness, especially in Internet research, organizational science, policy studies, and epidemiology. The first two of these research areas are contained within the study of communication, the focus of Professors Monge and Contractor's volume.

The new era of network analysis is marked by exponential rather than linear growth. The textbooks of the last fifteen years, whether elementary and expository (such as Dave Knoke and Jim Kuklinski's little green book published by Sage, and John Scott's small and limited but with a very readable introduction, also published by Sage) or advanced and focused (for example, the very nice volumes by Pip Pattison and by John Boyd), now appear rather narrow. Wasserman and Faust (1994), a decade old, needs about four additional chapters and two hundred pages to bring it into the present (but see the forthcoming Carrington, Scott, and Wasserman volume [2003] for overviews of new methods).

Enter Monge and Contractor (2003). Timely, broad, and detailed, the text you are holding is a welcome addition to the social network analysis canon. It is as clever as Friedkin (1998) and Watts (1999) but broader in coverage, and I expect this text to be used as recommended reading in network analysis courses, to demonstrate to researchers everywhere that network analysis must be multitheoretical. Such substantive theorizing will lead us to multilevel views of networks; but the crucial, and unique, aspect of network research of the new century is that it must be multianalytical. Monge and Contractor present a wide range of both substantive, theoretical concerns (collective action, cognition and contagion, exchange, proximity, and homophily theories, for example) and analytical approaches (particularly standard network models, and p*).

As the authors state in their acknowledgments, I am certainly not a bystander in their research endeavors. I have worked with both, particularly Professor Contractor, for many years; we have grants together, and several of the ideas in their earlier chapters stem from work that I did with Nosh and Katie Faust several years ago. But I have tried to keep my closeness to this volume from distorting my historical perspective on it, and from influencing my critical evaluation of it.