This essay proposes to view networks as sociocultural structures. Following authors from Leopold von Wiese and Norbert Elias to Gary Alan Fine and Harrison White, networks are configurations of social relationships interwoven with meaning. Social relationships as the basic building blocks of networks are conceived of as dynamic structures of reciprocal (but not necessarily symmetric) expectations between alter and ego. Through their transactions, alter and ego construct an idiosyncratic "relationship culture" comprising symbols, narratives, and relational identities. The coupling of social (...) relationships to networks, too, is heavily laden with meaning. The symbolic construction of persons is one instance of this coupling. Another instance is the application of social categories (like race or gender), which both map and structure social networks. The conclusion offers an agenda for research on this "meaning structure of social networks.". (shrink)

Discussions in sociological theory often focus on ontological questions on the nature of social reality. Against the underlying epistemological realism, I argue for a constructivist notion of theory: Theories are webs of concepts that we use to guide empirical observations and to make sense of them. We cannot know the real features of the social world, only what our theoretical perspectives make us see. Theories therefore represent social phenomena by highlighting certain features and relating them in a logical system. In (...) this system, theoretical sentences can be considered true if they meet two conditions: They are consistent with the theory at hand and adequately map empirically observable relations between objects denoted by theoretical constructs. Truth is therefore relative to a perspective; it is not objectively determinable. Theories should be assessed not for their ontologies but for what they allow us to see and how they connect to empirical observations. (shrink)

This article proposes to model and empirically study social networks as emerging, stabilizing, and changing in the process of communication. Rather than starting from actors, communicative events are conceptualized as the basic units. In the sequence of communication, these events are attributed to actors, together with underlying dispositions. Relational expectations about the behavior of actors towards others result, effectively structuring communication and making for the regularities of communication we observe as relationships and networks. Not only individuals, but also collective and (...) corporate actors can feature as nodes in social networks – as long as action is attributed to them, and relational expectations about their behavior to other actors develop. The approach combines recent developments in the theory of social networks by Harrison White and others with Niklas Luhmann’s theory of communication. (shrink)