New Developments in Social Network Analysis

Author(s):  
Daniel J. Brass

This review of social network analysis focuses on identifying recent trends in interpersonal social networks research in organizations, and generating new research directions, with an emphasis on conceptual foundations. It is organized around two broad social network topics: structural holes and brokerage and the nature of ties. New research directions include adding affect, behavior, and cognition to the traditional structural analysis of social networks, adopting an alter-centric perspective including a relational approach to ego and alters, moving beyond the triad in structural hole and brokerage research to consider alters as brokers, expanding the nature of ties to include negative, multiplex/dissonant, and dormant ties, and exploring the value of redundant ties. The challenge is to answer the question “What's next in social network analysis?” Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, Volume 9 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Author(s):  
Burçin Güçlü ◽  
Miguel Ángel Canela ◽  
Inés Alegre

Social network analysis has been widely used by organizational behavior researchers to stress the importance of the context, social connections, and social structure on human behavior. In the last decade, social network analysis has emerged as one of the most useful techniques for exploring online social networks, world wide web, e-mail traffic, and logistic operations. In this chapter, the authors present an application of social network analysis techniques for academic research. The authors choose Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory as the focus of their analysis and, based on that, develop a co-authorship structure that depicts in a clear manner the key authors and/or the researchers that dominate and bridge different sub-fields in the field of management. The authors discuss the implications of this study for academic research and management discipline.


Author(s):  
Pulkit Mehndiratta

With the ever-increasing acceptance of online social networks (OSNs), a new dimension has evolved for communication amongst humans. OSNs have given us the opportunity to monitor and mine the opinions of a large number of online active populations in real time. Many diverse approaches have been proposed, various datasets have been generated, but there is a need of collective understanding of this area. Researchers are working around the globe to find a pattern to judge the mood of the user; the still serious problem of detection of irony and sarcasm in textual data poses a threat to the accuracy of the techniques evolved till date. This chapter aims to help the reader to think and learn more clearly about the aspects of sentiment analysis, social network analysis, and detection of irony or sarcasm in textual data generated via online social networks. It argues and discusses various techniques and solutions available in literature currently. In the end, the chapter provides some answers to the open-ended question and future research directions related to the analysis of textual data.


Author(s):  
Ryan Light ◽  
James Moody

This chapter provides an introduction to this volume on social networks. It argues that social network analysis is greater than a method or data, but serves as a central paradigm for understanding social life. The chapter offers evidence of the influence of social network analysis with a bibliometric analysis of research on social networks. This analysis underscores how pervasive network analysis has become and highlights key theoretical and methodological concerns. It also introduces the sections of the volume broadly structured around theory, methods, broad conceptualizations like culture and temporality, and disciplinary contributions. The chapter concludes by discussing several promising new directions in the field of social network analysis.


Social networks fundamentally shape our lives. Networks channel the ways that information, emotions, and diseases flow through populations. Networks reflect differences in power and status in settings ranging from small peer groups to international relations across the globe. Network tools even provide insights into the ways that concepts, ideas and other socially generated contents shape culture and meaning. As such, the rich and diverse field of social network analysis has emerged as a central tool across the social sciences. This Handbook provides an overview of the theory, methods, and substantive contributions of this field. The thirty-three chapters move through the basics of social network analysis aimed at those seeking an introduction to advanced and novel approaches to modeling social networks statistically. The Handbook includes chapters on data collection and visualization, theoretical innovations, links between networks and computational social science, and how social network analysis has contributed substantively across numerous fields. As networks are everywhere in social life, the field is inherently interdisciplinary and this Handbook includes contributions from leading scholars in sociology, archaeology, economics, statistics, and information science among others.


Author(s):  
Mohana Shanmugam ◽  
Yusmadi Yah Jusoh ◽  
Rozi Nor Haizan Nor ◽  
Marzanah A. Jabar

The social network surge has become a mainstream subject of academic study in a myriad of disciplines. This chapter posits the social network literature by highlighting the terminologies of social networks and details the types of tools and methodologies used in prior studies. The list is supplemented by identifying the research gaps for future research of interest to both academics and practitioners. Additionally, the case of Facebook is used to study the elements of a social network analysis. This chapter also highlights past validated models with regards to social networks which are deemed significant for online social network studies. Furthermore, this chapter seeks to enlighten our knowledge on social network analysis and tap into the social network capabilities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 436-454
Author(s):  
Andrew M. Fox ◽  
Kenneth J. Novak ◽  
Tinneke Van Camp ◽  
Chadley James

Extant research suggests that membership in crime networks explains vulnerability to violent crime victimization. Consequently, identifying deviant social networks and understanding their structure and individual members' role in them could provide insight into victimization risk. Identifying social networks may help tailor crime prevention strategies to mitigate victimization risks and dismantle deviant networks. Social network analysis (SNA) offers a particular means of comprehending and measuring such group-level structures and the roles that individuals play within them. When applied to research on crime and victimization, it could provide a foundation for developing precise, effective prevention, intervention, and suppression strategies. This study uses police data to examine whether individuals most central to a deviant social network are those who are most likely to become victims of violent crime, and which crime network roles are most likely to be associated with vulnerability to violent victimization. SNA of these data indicates that network individuals who are in a position to manage the flow of information in the network (betweenness centrality), regardless of their number of connections (degree centrality), are significantly more likely to be homicide and aggravated assault victims. Implications for police practice are discussed.


Author(s):  
Diane Harris Cline

This chapter views the “Periclean Building Program” through the lens of Actor Network Theory, in order to explore the ways in which the construction of these buildings transformed Athenian society and politics in the fifth century BC. It begins by applying some Actor Network Theory concepts to the process that was involved in getting approval for the building program as described by Thucydides and Plutarch in his Life of Pericles. Actor Network Theory blends entanglement (human-material thing interdependence) with network thinking, so it allows us to reframe our views to include social networks when we think about the political debate and social tensions in Athens that arose from Pericles’s proposal to construct the Parthenon and Propylaea on the Athenian Acropolis, the Telesterion at Eleusis, the Odeon at the base of the South slope of the Acropolis, and the long wall to Peiraeus. Social Network Analysis can model the social networks, and the clusters within them, that existed in mid-fifth century Athens. By using Social Network Analysis we can then show how the construction work itself transformed a fractious city into a harmonious one through sustained, collective efforts that engaged large numbers of lower class citizens, all responding to each other’s needs in a chaine operatoire..


Author(s):  
Xianchao Zhang ◽  
Liang Wang ◽  
Yueting Li ◽  
Wenxin Liang

To identify global community structures in networks is a great challenge that requires complete information of graphs, which is infeasible for some large networks, e.g. large social networks. Recently, local algorithms have been proposed to extract communities for social networks in nearly linear time, which only require a small part of the graphs. In local community extraction, the community extracting assignments are only done for a certain subset of vertices, i.e., identifying one community at a time. Typically, local community detecting techniques randomly start from a vertex and gradually merge neighboring vertices one-at-a-time by optimizing a measure metric. In this chapter, plenty of popular methods are presented that are designed to obtain a local community for a given graph.


Author(s):  
Michele A. Brandão ◽  
Matheus A. Diniz ◽  
Guilherme A. de Sousa ◽  
Mirella M. Moro

Studies have analyzed social networks considering a plethora of metrics for different goals, from improving e-learning to recommend people and things. Here, we focus on large-scale social networks defined by researchers and their common published articles, which form co-authorship social networks. Then, we introduce CNARe, an online tool that analyzes the networks and present recommendations of collaborations based on three different algorithms (Affin, CORALS and MVCWalker). Through visualizations and social networks metrics, CNARe also allows to investigate how the recommendations affect the co-authorship social networks, how researchers' networks are in a central and eagle-eye context, and how the strength of ties behaves in large co-authorship social networks. Furthermore, users can upload their own network in CNARe and make their own recommendation and social network analysis.


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