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This paper is the text prepared for the keynote address of the EUSN 2017 conference in Mainz, Germany. A short presentation of concepts reflects in part the foundations of neo-structural sociology (NSS) and its use of social and organisational network analyses, combined with other methodologies, to better understand the roles of structure and culture in individual and collective agency. The presentation shows how NSS accounts for institutional change by focusing on the importance of combined relational infrastructures and rhetorics. Specific characteristics of institutional entrepreneurs who punch above their weight in institutionalization processes are introduced for that purpose, particularly the importance of multi-status oligarchs, status heterogeneity, high-status inconsistencies, collegial oligarchies, conflicts of interests and rhetorics of relative/false sacrifice. Two empirical examples illustrate this approach. The first case focuses on a network study of the Commercial Court of Paris, a 450-year-old judicial institution. The second case focuses on a network study of a field-configuring event (the so-called Venice Forum) lobbying for the emergence of a new European jurisdiction, the Unified Patent Court, and its attempt to create a common intellectual property regime for the continent. For sociologists, both examples involve “studying up”: they are cases of public/private joint regulation of markets bringing together these ingredients of institutionalization. The conclusion suggests future lines of research that NSS opens for the study of institutionalization, in particular using the dynamics of multi-level networks. One of the main issues raised by this approach is its contribution to the study of democratic deficits in a period of intense institutional change in Europe.
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Networks and Institutionalization: A Neo-structural Approach

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Reliability and validity are key concerns for any researcher. We investigate these concerns as they apply to social network analysis programs. Six well-used and trusted programs were compared on four common centrality measures (degree, betweenness, closeness, and eigenvector) under a variety of network topographies. We identify notable inconsistencies between programs that may not be apparent to the average user of these programs. Specifically, each program may have implemented a variant of a given measure without informing the user of its characteristics. This presents an unnecessary obfuscation for analysts seeking measures that are best suited to the idiosyncrasies of their data, and for those comparing results between programs.
Under such a paradigm, the terms in use within the social network analysis community become less precise over time and diverge from the original strength of network analysis: clarity.
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Are We in Agreement? Benchmarking and Reliability Issues between Social Network Analytic Programs

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This research captures local networks of German political parties and welfare agencies in regards to poverty. The article explores whether there are differences in regards to homophily and brokerage between the two studied groups using a dataset of 33 egonetworks in two German cities. The computer assisted drawn networks were collected in an interactive participative way together with the interviewed egonetworks. To achieve the theoretical aim of analysing homophily and brokerage between politicians and welfare workers, two hypotheses are examined, resting upon social capital theory. The hypotheses were quantified and explicated with different variables. The first hypothesis states that heterophile networks imply more social capital, which referred to different measurements (size, density, homophily). This could be partially validated since the analysed networks of association representatives (n=12) were denser and slightly more heterophile than those of party representatives (n=21). Second, it was assumed that politicians, because of their function as elected representatives, would be more likely to take on an interface function within the communities than representatives of civil society institutions. Results based on calculated EI-indices, subgraphs and brokerage show that party representatives do indeed have larger networks, but these networks split into fewer subgraphs than association representatives’ networks.
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A Visual Data Collection Method: German Local Parties and Associations

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This paper extends Compositional Equivalence – which is a structural correspondence type intended for multiplex networks – by incorporating actor attributes in the modeling of the network relational structure as diagonal matrices. As an illustration, we construct the positional system of the Florentine families network with Business and Marriage ties together with relevant characteristics acquired from the actors such as the families’ financial Wealth and the number of Priorates they held. Different representations of the cumulated person hierarchies reveal that adding Wealth to the modeling provides a more accurate picture of what the substantial narrative says about this network.
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Compositional Equivalence with Actor Attributes: Positional Analysis of the Florentine Families Network

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The local theatrical offer is the result of all the theatre companies which perform shows in each other’s venues. Theatre hospitality is an inherently relational phenomenon, and besides big national and international tours, it is an important part of the local cultural landscape. Aiming at contributing to the literature on network analysis applied to the inquiry on culture, the research adopts the network perspective to test hypotheses on companies’ relational behaviors and mechanisms of network formation in a local context in Italy. The analyses show that companies which get more public funding tend to host more; there is a homophily effect based on audience levels; companies tend to reciprocate hospitality relations and form clusters of close collaborations.
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Strategic and Genetic Networking: Relational Endowment in a Local Cultural Offer

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The Boston Special Youth Project (SYP) Affiliation dataset is a large, bipartite network representing interactions among 166 gang members from seven gangs for nearly three years. The project was conducted from June 1954 to May 1957 and represents one of the most elaborate gang intervention programs ever conducted. The SYP was a “detached-worker program,” where an adult (typically a graduate student from one of the surrounding universities) was assigned to an area (local parks, housing projects) to establish and maintain contact with and attempt to change the behaviors of the gangs. These workers collected detailed field notes (“contact cards”) documenting the activities of study gang members. However, the social network data collected on the contact cards were never analyzed by SYP staff. After the death of the project leader, Walter Miller, in 2004, the materials from the project became available to a team of researchers (faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students) in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. These researchers electronically scanned and digitized the contact cards, and began the process of creating a network from the cards. From these cards, a bipartite network was created where 166 individuals (i.e. gang members) were connected to 33,653 events (i.e. contact cards).
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The Boston Special Youth Project Affiliation Dataset

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Creating a poster with high-resolution network images can be a challenging task. In this article, the process of exporting a network figure from a network analysis tool, importing it in a vector graphics tool, and preparing the poster for print is discussed. The steps include critical strategies for producing print-quality figures that also apply to the preparation of network figures for journal publication. We discuss different file formats and argue that the favorite tool for creating conference posters – Microsoft PowerPoint – is not suitable for posters that include network figures. Instead, we suggest the use of Inkscape, a free and open-source tool, or a comparable vector graphics tool to prepare your posters. The goal of this article is to provide a tutorial-like description of the critical steps for creating a conference poster with high-resolution network figures.
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Creating a Conference Poster with High-Resolution Network Figures

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Network evolution is an important problem for social scientists, management consultants, and social network scholars. Unfortunately, few empirical data sets exist that have sufficient data to fully explore evolution dynamics. Increasingly, more and more online data sets are used in lieu of offline, face-to-face data. The veracities of these findings are questionable, however, because there are few studies exploring the similarity of online-offline dynamics. The IkeNet project investigated online and offline network evolution. Empirical data was collected on a group of 22 mid-career military officers going through a one-year graduate program. Data collection included email communication collected from the Exchange server, as well as self-reported friendship, and time spent together, over a course of 20 weeks. Numerous attribute data on the individual actors was collected from their military personnel files. The data allows network scholars to conduct research into the dynamics of network evolution and allows educators a real-world example data set for use in classroom instruction.
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Ike Net: Email and Friendship Evolution

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 44 (2024): Issue 1 (January 2024)

Volume 43 (2023): Issue 1 (January 2023)

Volume 42 (2022): Issue 1 (January 2022)

Volume 41 (2021): Issue 1 (January 2021)

Volume 40 (2020): Issue 1 (January 2020)

Volume 39 (2019): Issue 1 (January 2019)

Volume 38 (2018): Issue 1 (January 2018)

Volume 37 (2017): Issue 1-2 (January 2017)

Volume 36 (2016): Issue 1 (January 2016)

Connections

Connections publishes original empirical, theoretical, and methodological articles, as well as critical reviews dealing with applications of social network analysis. From volume 2018 the journal is published in a continous format.  The research spans many disciplines and domains including: Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, Communication, Economics, Organizational Behavior, Knowledge Management, Marketing, Social Psychology, Mathematics, Public Health, Medicine, Computer Science, and Policy.  As an official journal of the International Network for Social Network Analysis, the emphasis of the publication is to reflect the ever-growing and continually expanding community of scholars using network analytic techniques. Connections also provides an outlet for sharing news about social network concepts and techniques and new tools for research.  Rejection rate: 60%  Open Access Policy  This journal provides immediate open access to its content under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license users are free to share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapt the work (remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially) if the contribution was properly attributed and all of the changes indicated.  ABOUT SOCIETY  International Network for Social Network Analysis is the professional association for researchers interested in social network analysis. The association is a non-profit organization incorporated in the state of Delaware and founded by Barry Wellman in 1977.  INSNA was founded on the premise that the behavior and lives of social entities are affected by their position in the overall social structure. By examining the etiology and consequences of structural forms overall, of the location of entities within these structures, and of the formation and dynamics of ties that make up these structures, INSNA hopes to learn about the parts of behavior that are uniquely social.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process.