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Anthropology; Balance theory; Field theory; Gestalt psychology; Granovetter, Mark; Group dynamics; Hawthorne studies; Moreno, Jacob L.; Small worlds; Social physics; Social structure; Sociometry; Warner, W. Lloyd; White, Harrison C.
Abstract:
While social scientists had been drawing on the abstract idea of social networks clearly since the nineteenth century, which becomes most evident in Georg Simmel's formal sociology, a social network analysis (SNA) grounded in computational models and graphic imagery emerged within the field of small group research in the 1930s. It was Jacob Moreno who introduced the idea of depicting social structure as a network diagram (‘sociometry’). Kurt Lewin was an early contributor to the promotion of mathematical models of group relations, and Fritz Heider focused on triads to theorize on what throws groups out of balance. Mostly independent of these ideas, the anthropologist Lloyd Warner adopted a network approach in the study of informal relations between workers and of communities. SNA was further applied by the Manchester school of anthropologists to enhance ethnographic description. Advancing mathematical-formal aspects of SNA at Harvard in the 1970s, Harrison C. White and his collaborators contributed to the establishment of the discipline as a recognized paradigm. In the late 1990s, physicists began to publish work on social networks. Today, SNA has become a multidisciplinary research specialty with distinct theoretical concepts and data-analytic techniques.
