Tom A.B. Snijders

Emmanuel Lazega

Rafael P.M. Wittek

This cutting-edge Research Agenda demonstrates how social network analysis can be used to address problems of social resilience and advance knowledge and policy intervention in the face of the existential crises that threaten our contemporary societies. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

A Research Agenda for Social Networks and Social Resilience

This volume provides new insights into the functioning of organizational, managerial and market societies. Multilevel analysis and social network analysis are described and the authors show how they can be combined in developing the theory, methods and empirical applications of the social sciences. This book maps out the development of multilevel reasoning and shows how it can explain behavior, through two different ways of contextualizing it. First, by identifying levels of influence on behavior and different aggregations of actors and behavior, and complex interactions between context and behavior. Second, by identifying different levels as truly different systems of agency: such levels of agency can be examined separately and jointly since the link between them is affiliation of members of one level to collective actors at the superior level. It is by combining these approaches that this work offers new insights. New case studies and datasets that explore new avenues of theorizing and new applications of methodology are presented. This book will be useful as a reference work for all social scientists, economists and historians who use network analyses and multilevel statistical analyses. Philosophers interested in the philosophy of science or epistemology will also find this book valuable. ​

Theory, Methods and Applications

Multilevel Network Analysis for the Social Sciences

This insightful book theorizes the contrast between two logics of organization: bureaucracy and collegiality. Based on this theory and employing a new methodology to transform our sociological understanding, Emmanuel Lazega sheds light on complex organizational phenomena that impact markets, political economy, and social stratification.

Redefining Organizations with Multilevel Relational Infrastructures

Bureaucracy, Collegiality and Social Change

Ismael Al-Amoudi

"When the Matrix trilogy was published in the mid-1980s, it introduced to mass culture a number of post-human tropes about the conscious machines that have haunted our collective imaginaries ever since. This volume explores the social representations and significance of technological developments - especially AI and human enhancement - that have started to transform our human agency. It uses these developments to revisit theories of the human mind and its essential characteristics: a first person perspective, concerns and reflexivity. It looks at how the smart machines are used as agents of change in the basic institutions and organisations that hold contemporary societies together: for example in the family and the household, in commercial corporations, in health institutions, or in the military. Its main purpose it to enrich the ongoing public discussion of the social and political implications of the smart machines by looking at the extent to which they further digitalize and bureaucratize the world, in particular by asking whether they are used to develop techno-totalitarian societies that corrode normativity and solidarity"--

Confronting the Matrix

Post-Human Institutions and Organizations

Johannes Glückler

Ingmar Hammer

This book discusses a core question in many fields of the social sciences, namely how to create, share and adopt new knowledge. It creates an original space for conversation between two lines of research that have developed largely in parallel for a long time: social network theory and the geography of knowledge. This book considers that relational thinking has become increasingly important for scholars to capture societal outcomes by studying social relations and networks, whereas the role of place, space and spatial scales has been somewhat neglected outside an emergent geography of knowledge. The individual contributions help integrate network arguments of connectivity, geographical arguments of contiguity and contextuality into a more comprehensive understanding of the ways in which people and organizations are constrained by and make use of space and networks for learning and innovation. Experts in the fields of geography, sociology, economics, political science, psychology, management and organizational studies develop conceptual models and propose empirical research that illustrates the ways in which networks and geography play together in processes of innovation, learning, leadership, and power. This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Emmanuel Lazega

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