Cultural Sociology series

Culture and Cognition: Patterns in the Social Construction of Reality, Wayne H. Brekhus

Protest: A Cultural Introduction to Social Movements, James M. Jasper Culture in Networks, Paul McLean

The Culture of Markets, Frederick F. Wherry

I would first like to thank Jonathan Skerrett of Polity who guided me along the process to completion of this project with gentle yet enthusiastic support – even when I periodically blew up at him via email with my frustrations. I would also like to acknowledge the input of two anonymous reviewers for Polity – one of whom strongly encouraged me to believe that what I was doing was worthwhile, the other of whom pushed me hard to try to make this a more coherent and useful book.

Many scholars have helped me to think about networks and culture in interesting ways over the years. Rather than identify them by name, I hope their influence will be evident repeatedly in the pages of this book. However, I would like to single out my teacher and collaborator, John Padgett, for encouraging me onto this path of exploring the cultural aspects of social networks many years ago.

I appreciate the assistance of May Nguyen, Haniyyah Hopkins and Susan Jaw, who at different times provided me with a great deal of help in organizing the bibliography for this book. Leigh Mueller did a great job of copy-editing the manuscript.

Much of this book was written in a faculty study at the Alexander Library at Rutgers University, where I could utilize the library’s terrific collection of materials. Although I developed no strong personal relationship with the staff of the library during my evening and weekend sojourns there, I am very grateful for the use of that space, and simply for the existence of such a welcoming place in which to work. I am a huge fan of the open-stacks, public university library, of which Alex is a great example.

I would like to thank all of my colleagues and friends in the Sociology department at Rutgers University for providing me with a hospitable academic home for the last sixteen-plus years. In particular, I thank Debby Carr, Chip Clarke, Jeanie Danner, Judy Gerson, Lisa Iorillo, Joanna Kempner, Laurie Krivo, Diane Molnar, Julie Phillips, Pat Roos, Zakia Salime, Hana Shepherd, Randy Smith, Kristen Springer, Dianne Yarnell, and Eviatar Zerubavel for times spent talking in each other’s offices or otherwise hanging out. I also greatly appreciate the intellectual stimulation I received, especially with respect to the conjoined topics of networks and culture, from two former colleagues: John Levi Martin, now at the University of Chicago, and Ann Mische, now at the University of Notre Dame. I miss them both. I very much appreciate the network ties I have formed with Marya Doerfel, Keith Hampton, and Matt Weber in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers over the last several years. And I would also like to give a shout-out to Professor Brad Evans in Rutgers’ excellent English department, for our stimulating discussions about novels, networks, and the digital humanities, and simply for his friendship.

I owe my biggest debt to many students – both graduate students and undergraduates – who, in various ways, have stimulated my interest in the diverse intersections of social networks and culture, and led me to think of those intersections more coherently. In particular, I have in mind Jeff Dowd, Gina Giacobbe, Neha Gondal, Anne Kavalerchik, Preeti Khanolkar, Eric Kushins, Vanina Leschziner, Yusheng Lin, Janet Lorenzen, Derek Ludovici, Sourabh Singh, Kathy Smith, Eunkyung Song, Charles Tong, and King-to Yeung. I would like to thank Neha in particular for the especially formative role she has played in developing my understanding of, and my approach to, networks and culture, through our collaborative research.

On a more personal note, I’d like to thank Susan Liebell for being the best co-parent anyone could hope for. I thank my two younger children, Adam and Julia Liebell-McLean, who turned me into the father of twins – a network position I never anticipated occupying – in 1999, and who have lent so much meaning to my life ever since. Finally, I thank my older son, Eli Liebell-McLean, for the ways he too has enriched my life. And I dedicate this little book to him, cognizant that he has a deeper but also more intuitive grasp of the ways culture and networks go together than I am ever likely to have.

This book provides an extended treatment of the various ways in which we can imagine social networks to intersect with culture. The term social network refers to a set of entities – actors, organizations, or locations, for example – and the ties that exist among them. Social network analysis refers to a set of concepts and procedures by means of which social network properties may be analyzed. The term culture is one of the most complex terms in the social sciences to define, but we can understand it broadly to refer to the knowledge, beliefs, expectations, values, practices, and material objects by means of which we craft meaningful experiences for ourselves and with each other. It might help a bit to think of networks as hardware (circuitry) and culture as software (rules and routines for action), although that analogy is deceptively clear. The circuitry is largely inert without rules or recipes specifying how the parts go together, how information is to be created, and how communication flow will be controlled. On the other hand, the products that may be potentially created via the software are activated only via concrete pathways and connections existing in network form. Again, the analogy is simplistic, but it has the merit of reinforcing the idea that social networks and culture go together synthetically, even necessarily. What varies is only the extent to which either network structure or cultural recipes are emphasized in order to answer specific research questions.

The amount of scholarly attention devoted to the two topics of networks and culture, taken separately, has grown tremendously in recent years. The International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) hosts an annual conference of ever-growing proportions, and it is home to a highly active listserv for the discussion of all kinds of networks-related questions. Meanwhile, the Culture section of the American Sociological Association has grown into one of the very largest since the late 1990s.

More substantively speaking, on the networks side, although the roots of social network analysis run back to the 1930s,¹ since the turn of the new century we have witnessed the birth of the so-called “new science of networks” (Watts 1999, 2003; Barabási 2002). According to this perspective, networks are understood to be everywhere – from cellular structure to the architecture of our brains and the mechanics of information processing, from transportation systems to global trade patterns. More to the point for our purposes here, networks are ubiquitous in the social world (Christakis and Fowler 2009). For example, networks provide us with social support (Wellman and Wortley 1990; Rainie and Wellman 2012), they reputedly help us find jobs (Granovetter 1995), they affect disease transmission (Morris 1993), they knit together social and political elites (Knoke 1993; Domhoff 2010), they exist in the structure of ownership in advanced capitalist economies (Mizruchi 1992; Burris 2005), they account for the emergence of new industries and organizational forms (Powell et al. 2005; Padgett and Powell 2012), they foster and support social protest (Diani and McAdam 2003), and much, much more. Besides all of that, who among us is not familiar with Facebook and Twitter, or for that matter World of Warcraft or Second Life or Reddit, among the myriad emerging forms of media where virtual social interaction takes place on a massive scale (e.g., Lewis et al. 2008)? These relatively new venues of social behavior work fundamentally on network principles, even if they remain under-explored using formal social network analytic tools.² Indeed, the internet itself is a giant network of communication links. We live in a “connected” (Christakis and Fowler 2009), “networked” (Castells 1996) world. Networks are our social “operating system” (Rainie and Wellman 2012).

With respect to the culture side of the picture, for several decades now we have understood the social world in the wake of the “cultural turn” in the social sciences (Bonnell and Hunt 1999; Jacobs and Spillman 2005).³ After the cultural turn, culture can no longer be seen as something simply derived from social structure – as if, for example, the democratic structure of government and democratic nature of our society ensured that we adhere to democratic values fully, consistently, and unquestioningly. An adequate treatment of the cultural turn would take us deep into social theory and the philosophy of knowledge, topics well beyond the scope of this book. Suffice to say for present purposes that historians and social scientists in the late 1970s began to turn away from accounts of social reality that focused on concrete material relations in society, such as instances of economic exploitation, to accounts that took culture seriously – culture not only in the sense of cultural objects such as art, music, theatre, or dance, but in the form of jointly produced language, symbols, schemas, institutions, and much more. Culture became newly understood as an engine of social change, and/or as webs of significance (Geertz 1973) through which we perceive, and operate in, the material world. Stated succinctly, culture became a vital, vibrant element of social explanation. The turn to culture also entailed for many scholars a turn away from positivist⁴ approaches to social explanation to more interpretive approaches. Frequently enough, too, the cultural turn was accompanied by more critical methods for analyzing social phenomena – methods that unpacked and historicized taken-for-granted cultural beliefs, norms, values, institutions, social classification categories, and previously unexamined practices that structure the social world and systematically privilege certain groups over others (McDonald 1996; Adams et al. 2005). By these standards – a redefinition of what culture is, a new appreciation of its various manifestations, and an awareness of its independent role in sustaining inequalities of social power – attention to culture became also a new way of doing sociology, indicated in part by use of the label “strong program” with respect to the practice of cultural sociology (Alexander 2003; Friedland and Mohr 2004; Reed and Alexander 2009; Alexander et al. 2012).

The amount of scholarly attention devoted to the ways network and culture combine has similarly grown since 2000. But knowledge of how they may be combined may not be widely appreciated – especially by those new to the area – in part because of the longstanding character of research on each topic. Networks and culture have sometimes seemed antithetical to each other. For one thing, it has sometimes been too easy to think of networks simply in structural terms. Recall my “hardware” analogy from the beginning of this chapter: Networks constitute the architecture of connections among objects, and so they describe spatial patterns that “determine” where we can travel or where power flows. Some early work on networks insisted on the primacy of structure over content, and the comparability of the properties of social organization across networks without attending to relational content or symbolic meanings. Actually, that is a very cool idea! We need abstract models of social structures in order to develop theoretical claims, as Georg Simmel (1971b) argued long ago in “The Problem of Sociology.” But there is justified concern that such a desire for developing arguments for the autonomy or even primacy of structure can go too far. Fascination today with the structural properties of networks – small worlds, six degrees of separation, clustering coefficients, degree distributions, preferential attachment, and so on, are some of the notions eagerly studied – under the rubric of the “new science of networks” is at risk of treating cultural processes and cultural content in a rather mechanical way, or ignoring them altogether. When we think of a social network architecture or circuitry, we ought to be thinking: what exactly is it that flows through this circuitry? What sustains this flow? How does change come about in network structures? How do people interact with each other inside these networks? How are people’s identities – the faces they present, the goals they pursue, and the interests they develop – shaped by network structures? Conversely, how do people’s identities, their beliefs about the social world, and the kinds of messages they send affect the kinds of network structures they create and how those networks evolve? How do people’s expectations shape the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of social network ties? These questions of cultural forms, content and practices seem especially important today and for the foreseeable future as we shift our attention increasingly to social media: large-scale networks of interpersonal communication.

Not only because of the structuralist bent of some network analysis, but also because of the methodological shift toward interpretation and (more or less) away from the measurement and collection of “hard” data after the cultural turn, cultural approaches and network structural approaches would seem to make strange bedfellows.⁵ Nevertheless, when starting with an interest in culture – that is, processes of meaning-making, identity formation, and communication using existing practices and symbols – thinking in network terms can help us to understand with more precision where and how new cultural ideas arise, how they are disseminated, where they collect, and why they might be unevenly distributed in society.

Throughout the rest of this book, I will adumbrate diverse analytical intersections of culture and networks: that is, various ways the analysis of social networks and the analysis of culture can be brought together. I do not argue for the superiority of one intersection over another. As I noted above, where the causal emphasis falls and how network analytical and cultural tools are used is largely a matter of the research questions one cares to answer. But all of these intersections are interesting because they address, head on, the fact that social life is comprised of both patterns of interactions and relations on the one hand, and communicative meaning-making processes on the other. I sort these different intersections of networks and culture into five main subtopics or themes, and I devote one chapter to each theme. As a shorthand tool, I use a different preposition to represent the nature of the culture/network linkage for each theme. These themes are as follows:

• Culture THROUGH networks: in chapter 4, I will discuss primarily the diffusion or flow of cultural materials – innovations, ideas, practices, frames, commitments – within networks. One of the key ways in which we can build a more culturally rich understanding of diffusion is by keeping in mind the idea that, as objects and ideas diffuse, they are frequently re-invented (Rogers 2003) or adapted to new locales. In recent times, with respect to the diffusion of memes on the internet, such re-invention is practically definitional, as people creatively adapt and/or parody visual images through the apparatus of Photoshop and similar applications. I discuss some general models put forward by sociologists of how and where culture spreads through networks, and I focus illustratively on the extensive research on social movements that stresses the spread of people, protest commitments, repertoires of action, symbols, and frames across multiple movements.
• Culture FROM networks: here I have in mind the creation of culture as a product of network structure, specifically in the form of emergent identities and roles, as well as the distinctly different idea of the production of culture via interaction in social networks. I treat these topics in chapter 5. I discuss some classic sociological research that used blockmodeling to argue that people occupy particular roles in a network structure, and that occupancy of these roles determines their social identities, thereby strongly shaping their opportunities and practices. However, I also discuss at length a strand of research stressing that networks may be particularly fecund spaces in which invention and innovation arise in all kinds of creative fields, from science and philosophy to music and visual arts.
• Networks FROM culture: in chapter 6, I pick up the idea that the shape of networks may well be based on participants’ cultural preferences and practices, and the kinds of norms that exist that compel us to look to certain people for certain kinds of social support. To think in this way lends culture a more “programmatic” function than we encountered in the previous two chapters. Culture may also be thought of in part as a toolkit of practices and styles people utilize as they manage their networks. I also discuss how culture guides the social ties we form, and how different kinds of cultural endowments (cultural capital) empower us to take advantage of network opportunities (social capital) to different extents. Networks may be seen not so much as rigid structures, but as flexible fabrics providing opportunities for interaction.
• Networks OF culture (or culture AS networks): network ideas can be used to analyze culture and cultural phenomena as relational “systems.” In chapter 7, I discuss how certain symbols, certain words, certain ideas, and so on, are linked, either by virtue of their co-occurrence in particular texts, or by virtue of their joint deployment by specific users. What is most at stake here is the understanding and mapping of culture as meaning, or, more precisely, culture as comprised of a set of meanings formed in relation to each other.
• Networks AS culture: in chapter 8, we explore ways in which particular cultures – both historical examples and contemporary ones – are thought to entail a kind of networking mentality. Some scholars argue, for instance, that networks in the contemporary world bear within them, inherently, certain kinds of cultural values and beliefs, so that their construction and composition assume that imprint. Culture is not merely a property of actors, nor something “out there” affecting what people think and do, but is embedded as meanings attached directly to specific kinds of network ties and forms of social interaction. In the latter part of this chapter, I discuss in an exploratory way new frontiers for thinking about intersections of social networks and culture: in internet-based activity, especially Web 2.0 sites, and in virtual gameplay. Growing literatures in communications, media studies, and game studies describe these worlds, but not very much work by sociologists has yet tried to integrate network-oriented and culture-oriented approaches to them.

Before we explore these diverse empirical intersections of networks and culture, however, I devote chapter 2 to an overview of important concepts and measures in social network analysis, though with a cultural inflection, and chapter 3 to a discussion of important concepts and arguments in cultural sociology, with a view to integrating them into the study of networks. My hope is that you can refer to these fundamental concepts and arguments recurrently as needed as you make your way through the rest of the book.

An integrated study of networks and culture is one vital way of carrying out a richly relational form of sociology (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Emirbayer 1997; White 2008; DiMaggio 2011; Fuhse and Mützel 2011; see especially Crossley 2011 and Mische 2011). The basic premise of relational sociology, to put it a little too simply, is that relations, rather than fully formed individuals or fixed social structures, are the proper object and fundamental unit of analysis for sociological research. Individual preferences and actions vary in different relational situations, implying that “social structure” at the macro level and “individual preference” at the micro level are concepts too rigid to account for the variation we observe in social life on a constant and ongoing basis. Studying networks is a way of processing the relationality of the world through a structural lens. Studying culture is a way of interpreting the relational basis of the meanings by which we organize our lives. Putting the two together helps us think about how these two modes of relation also mutually influence each other.