Conceptualizing and Modeling Relational Processes: Introducing Disjointed Fluidity

What is a relationship? Jacqueline Joslyn sets out to answer this thorny question. How satisfied one will be with the answers provided will hinge on one’s feelings regarding the necessity of the question, as well as how nuanced one seeks to be in considering social ties as objects of inquiry. For more structural social network scholars, the question and answers may not be so complicated. Researchers frequently take a realist approach to this question (i.e., a relationship exists when someone says they have a directed sentiment toward another individual), or an even less psychological nominalist approach that utilizes secondary data or observations (i.e., a relationship exists when some proximity or interaction is observed or recorded). In short, many network analysts are willing to sacrifice an in-depth analysis of the mental contents of a social tie to focus more on the interpersonal structure of ties that emerges at a higher level of abstraction.

Joslyn’s approach wants structuralists to slow down. The whole point of this short but dense work is to appreciate the nuance and the complexity that is a dyad, and to look within individuals more or less shared understandings of their ties. To deepen and extend social network analysis, Joslyn proposes a set of concepts that aim to parse the largely cognitive contents that exist within a directed sentiment relation. Joslyn begins by urging the reader to consider the complexity of a relationship. Thus, the outlined approach serves as an elaboration of more realist approaches to social ties (noted above) by looking at the elements that come together within an individual’s report that a relationship exists. Joslyn then proposes a research agenda enriched by looking to the “pixels” and “flows” that constitute interconnected memories at the root of a relationship. Each “pixel” represents a “real or imagined event or cognitive output” (RIECO). These pixels are held together primarily in flows of time. However, “pixels and flows, in reality, can become muddled” (p. 55). By plumbing how individuals do or do not share the elements within a “disjointed fluidity” that constitutes the mental contents of a relationship, Joslyn suggests a new type of descriptive and inductive cognitive network analysis.

Clearly, a tidy answer to the primary research question is not the goal of this book. Rather, Joslyn provides a framework for going deeper into how individuals understand what it means to have a friend, a family member, a mentor, and so on. Thus, we can see that the primary audience and utility for such an approach is likely to be a more qualitative researcher using interview data. Indeed, Josyln demonstrates such utility with interview data on mentorship in academia, illustrating the proposed framework on a small number of in-depth interviews. Consequently, this book is likely to be most useful for those teaching graduate courses on qualitative network analysis, or supplementing a research methods course or course on narrative analysis with an interesting set of ideas that do not yet have a strong comparative, let alone quantitative, basis. In the end, the book probably is framed too much at trying to export more nuance into structuralism, rather than trying to import more structuralism into qualitative approaches. That said, I am hopeful that researchers will take this work as inspiration for building a more systematic approach.

Building a more systematic approach would likely require more theorizing on how ties form in the first place. In focusing on “what” a relation is, Josyln puts aside questions of “how” and “why” ties form that are based on social psychological drives. But without such drives, we are left with a largely descriptive approach that provides a way to do inductive work. But, as with all social scientific research, such inductive work will prove useful to the extent it ultimately speaks to various theories and can generate more testable predictions. Josyln’s intentional focus on conceptualizing and operationalizing the mental contents of relationships, while not advancing any one theory of tie formation or dissolution, closes with a chapter including many questions for future research. Its key conceptual tools for answering these questions are open to adaption to various projects and point the researcher in a novel direction that deserves empirical investigation.

I hope that others will pick up where Josyln has left off in going deeper into the nature of ties, and using recollections and the stories that constitute ties as the basis for a type of structural analysis. For example, given advances in large language models since the publication of this book, in principle, a researcher could extend Joslyn’s approach in a more comparative direction. Importantly, one could begin to incorporate other kinds of nodes into the relational network, such as parasocial relationships and one-sided intimacies (to social media personalities or politicians) and ways that individuals relate to nonhumans companions (pets, chatbots, or even deities). To the extent that individuals report such relationships do in fact exist and individuals attribute minds to such nodes, these relationships likely deserve equal footing within one’s network as meaningful and having a type of social influence. There is a clear need to better incorporate empathy and a theory of mind into the social network research agenda by putting an individual’s psychology back into the web of social relations. Josyln adds a unique perspective to how a researcher might pursue such a research agenda.

Whether “pixels” and “flows” become more widely used concepts for going deeper into the cognitive contents of social ties, Joslyn has provided a map others may choose to follow, elaborating with both theory and additional methods. For those scholars willing to dwell on the content of social ties, this will be a provocative work.