Social Structure and Meaning

• Most network research neglects the meaning linked to networks and relationships.
• Chapter 2 sketches the interplay of structure and meaning in networks, along with methodological implications that lays the foundation for deeper dives in later chapters, including groups, ethnic categories, role patterns, love and gender.
• This approach draws heavily on the relational sociology of Harrison White and incorporates insights from systems theory, social psychology, symbolic interactionism, and social anthropology.

Social Structure and Meaning

• Social structure is substantially composed of symbolic constructs, like expectations, identities, and categories.
• Network research focuses on structure and meaning, exploring culture and meaning.
• A historical overview shows how culture integrates network research.
• Social relationships, as network units, consist of relational expectations that are symbolic and interwoven with cultural forms.

Dyadic Relationships and Network Formation

• Dyadic relationships couple to form a network.
• Multiple ties relate in communicative events.
• Identities are constructed as involved in multiple relationships.
• Social relationships are negotiated and defined by culturally available "relationship frames."
• Network constellations correspond to cultural formations as symbolic forms shared in densely connected clusters, and also by structurally equivalent positions in a network.

Levels of Network Research

• Social network research involves five interrelated levels:
• Analytical picture of the network (derived from empirical observation).
• Patterns of communication.
• Interpersonal expectations that evolve and guide communication.
• Opportunity structures for contact.
• Social categories and relationship models.

Analytical Picture of Networks

• Analytical pictures are derived from research.
• Researchers often deal with relationships between actors as 1s and 0s
• Relationships are either observed to exist or not, depending on operational definitions.

Patterns of Communication

• Patterns of communication are analyzed in trade networks, email exchanges, or recorded conversations.
• Communication processes have a supra-personal quality, shaped more by structural and situational exigencies than intentions.
• Analyzing communication patterns is a reliable method for detecting network structures if the type of transactions are specified.

Interpersonal Expectations

• Communication is what happens in networks, and the third level is why particular communication occurs between actors.
• Social structures consist of expectations, with social networks and relationships featuring specific relational expectations about actor behavior toward others.
• The same holds in any network ties as relatively stable patterns of communication emerge through established expectations.
• Relational expectations are outside formal organizations/larger social fields but only in ties between two actors.
• The tie between A and B becomes a relationship due to repeated communication and relational expectations.
• Relational expectations influence the construction of identities, negotiated relationships and identities and the definition, of “what is going on” in a relationship.

Meaning Structure of Social Networks

• Meaning structure consists of the forms of meaning (identities, stories, expectations) attached to actors in a network and to the ties between them.
• Meaning location is subjective (Weber/Schütz) or in communication (Luhmann).
• Social relationships and identities carry a meaning in their context as relational expectations.
• Meaning draws on symbolic forms available in the wider cultural context.
• Subjective conceptions and expectations are network research bases. Network generators draw on individual accounts of network connections equating the network with subjected perceptions.

Communication Patterns and Meaning Structure

• Patterns of communication and the meaning structure mirror that of network ties as relational "states" and on the basis of "events."
• Relational states develop from events and structure them, meaning measurement and conceptualizations prevent conflation and confusion.
• Meaning structure and communication patterns are influenced by opportunity structures, social categories, and relationship models. These order networks by constraining and enabling communication patterns and meaning structures.

Opportunity Structures for Contact

• Opportunity structures include the place of residence and other foci of activity.
• Foci of activity affect communication, leading to new ties or deepening relationships.
• Place of residence and foci of activity are characterized by the composition of people meeting in terms of demographics.
• Opportunity structures are often not devoid of meaning, as people move to locations based on expectations.

Relationship Models and Social Categories

• Factors comprise relationship models (love, kinship, friendship) and social categories (gender, age, ethnic descent).
• These belong to the realm of culture that is shared in a context and relational institutions that model how to relate.
• Relationship models/social categories structure ties and networks according to cultural expectations.
• These make relationship life easier by supplying prepackaged expectations to reduce communication uncertainty; adoptions become part of the meaning structure, indirectly affecting communication patterns.
• Opportunity structures and relational institutions form part of the wider sociocultural configuration of society.
• Actual networks are patterned by these factors and enable/prevent contact. Categories/relationship models prescribe interaction, ordering contacts into patterns of structural equivalence.

Integrated Model of Network Analysis

• The causal starting points are the socio-demographic and cultural structures with opportunity structures make for a structuring of the patterns of communication.
• Social categories and relationship models are adopted as part of the meaning structure to influence the definition of identities and relationships.
• Communication patterns and meaning structure constitute the network as a social structure, intricately tied to each other.
• Social networks, meaning structure, and communication patterns are tightly interconnected although we may not be able to relate these levels of networks empirically.

Culture and Meaning

• There is feedback from networks to sociodemographics and cultural patterns.
• Social categories and relationship models are reproduced and modified in the interplay of communication and meaning structure.

Meaning

• Meaning is the wider term that humans attach to objects/symbols by acting on these meanings.
• Weber argued that all action is driven by the subjective meaning of their environment. And Shütz insisted that an actor orient themselves to the layers of meaning.
• There are twin versions of reality: the objective and the idea.
• Laws, family, and other entities are crystallized meaning structures.
• Human actors act upon expectations they hold of the behavior of others.
• All social structures consist of cognitive/normative expectations and expectations of others.

Symbols and Interaction

• Individuals subjectively process symbols and negotiate their meaning in interaction.
• A “definition of the situation” arises for subsequent interaction start from.
• Meaning is not confined to individuals but becomes consequential in communication.
• It is processed dually, in psychic systems/communication.
• Sociology should focus on meaning in communication as communicated meaning and becomes consequential through organizational decision opinions, mass, news, scientific claims, political claims, etc.
• The focus on communication radically breaks with action-theoretical traditions and connects with Mead/Blumer, most symbolic interactionism focuses on subjective meaning more than meaning-interaction.
• Linguistics consider meaning in signs rather than only in people’s minds (de Saussure [1916] 2013; Morris 1971).
• Meaning is analyzed in communication (verbal/texts with without inferring the subjective dispositions and interpretations of actors in line with Luhmann's notice.

Components of Meaning

• The meaning of something-always relates to the meaning of other things
• Word meaning consists in the relations to other words.
• Meaning is organized in relations connecting symbols, practices, social contexts, roles, and expectations.
• Overall, the notion of “meaning” signifies an interpretive stance, but must specify a designated area of social phenomena with social scientists must investigate what people think of the world.
• Meaning covers what we see when interpreting signs, texts, or behavior.
• Interpretive stance observes meaning.
• Social structures are symbolically constructed to vary in the meaning we attach to them and their social reality lies in structures of meaning we devise. Relies on definitions of the situation; consists of expectations.

Culture

• Culture is slightly easier to define than meaning, though it suffers breadth and encompasses norms, values, knowledge, language/symbols, and practices.
• Culture is shared within a context, and it is the “culture of this context”.
• That disregarding meaning leads to faulty interpretations and should be incorporated into theory and empirical research.

Network Culture

• Available and Widely Used
• The forms of meaning in a "culture" have to become independent of their application in communication to acquire an abstract meaning. Thus. the forms must be known and relatively invariant in their particular context.
• Social habitats of culture range from Dyadic relationships the jargon distinct ways of communicating to the culture organization.
• A network domain comprises all sorts of symbols, narratives, and linguistic forms that emerge in a densely knit network context, characterizing it in contrast to other network contexts,

Culture in Networks

• It is impossible to draw on cultural material not available in a given context; isolated network contexts show more homogeneity.
• The extent to which culture determines action depends on the configuration of sociocultural context.
• Culture includes the social categories and relationship models that to the level of meaning assigned to actors and to the ties between them level 3.

Incorporating Culture

• Original researchers considered it more methodical refinements until Harrison White created the blockmodel technique.
• Blockmodeling starts from the idea that network patterns follow underlying patterns of actors and relationships and makes for systematic relations.
• It derives categories of actors from network and tries to map the categorical order of social networks without categories/self-descriptions.
• Cultural/social psychological meanings of actual ties are largely bypassed ( 1976, 734)

Identity and Control

• Relational sociologist generally followed White’s lead in the New York school. The approach focuses the theoretical reflection of social networks/application to sociocultural phenomena. .
• Some pursue the line to analyze networks of categories/relation frames instead of actors: the aim of this research is to identify patterns of culture (1998). It is concerned networks between linguistics.
• American Network research has gone down a structuralist path to follow the “antcategorical imperative or in arguing that social networks need to not structured by diffuse boundaries (1997).
• Social networks may be seen as constituted processes communication intersection.

Relationships As Expectations

• Networks of ties between/individual collective actors; dyadic relationships are described as basic firms of society that are filled with meanings but with resulting social dynamics.
• More precise social relationship definition found in Weber’s work states the term “social relationship” will be used to content meaningful action term relationship exists entirely exclusively in probability meaningful course.
• Pattern the “action profiles” consist activities expected within relationship.
• Social groups consist processes dynamics between closeness relationships processes integrated regularities communication of structure.

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