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. Highlighting the role of social networks in supporting social resilience, contributions from experienced and innovative thinkers across the social sciences encourage readers to think in network terms about issues of social change and survival in situations of vulnerability. Chapters apply innovative social network thinking and analyses to a diverse range of existential societal challenges, including marginalized communities, emerging labour markets, governments, food systems, educational establishments, online social media, and the environment. The book further advances critical research frontiers that will inform the building of more resilient societies and ecosystems and ultimately strengthen our capacity to project ourselves into the future. Combining network-based critical analysis with in-depth knowledge of policy design and intervention, this dynamic Research Agenda will be an essential tool for postgraduate students carrying out research in the social sciences. Its provision of state-of-the-art research agendas in eighteen vital domains of social life will benefit analysts and consultants designing, implementing, and evaluating policy in these areas.

For individual actors involved in economic activities (i.e. production, exchanges), conventions and structures represent two different types of opportunity or constraint. Conventions refer to values, rules and representations that influence economic behaviour. Structures refer to patterns of resource interdependencies existing among members of any social system. This book contributes to the current rapprochement between economics and sociology. It examines the fact that individuals use rules and interdependencies to forward their own interests, while living in social environments where everyone does the same. The authors argue that to construct durable organizations and viable markets, they need to be able to handle both. However, thus far, economists and sociologists have not been able to reconcile the relationship between these two types of constraints on economic activity. Conventions and Structures in Economic Organization seeks to bridge this gap and will appeal to students and scholars in both economics and sociology, offering them new ideas about how they can co-operate in unsuspected ways and combine their interdisciplinary efforts.

For many years Emmanuel Lazega has explored communication behavior and decision-making processes of small workgroups within larger organizations. To account for the knowledge claims of members of those groups, and for the ways in which such claims are legitimated collectively and translated into action, he presents a theory of the interactive elaboration of information on which decisions are based.

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. Lazega focuses on how organizations use and combine logics of bureaucracy and collegiality, deploying and developing the analysis of multilevel networks to explore how these logics coalesce and interact in organizational settings and stratigraphies. Revisiting sociological knowledge on various phenomena, such as coopetition in science, markets and government, the creation of new institutions in political economy and elite self-segregation, this book advances our perception of the changes introduced in the contemporary 'science of organizations' by the digitalization of society. Offering new theoretical insights into organizations, this book is crucial for sociologists of organizations and management scholars, as well as postgraduate students, in search of an innovative understanding of the trajectories of contemporary organizations. The analysis of multilevel networks will also benefit practitioners and analysts working in the field.

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 is 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 digitalise and bureaucratise the world, in particular by asking whether they are used to develop techno-totalitarian societies that corrode normativity and solidarity.

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 is 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 digitalise and bureaucratise the world, in particular by asking whether they are used to develop techno-totalitarian societies that corrode normativity and solidarity.

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.

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.

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.

This book examines cooperation among rival partners in a Northeastern US corporate law firm. Members are portrayed as interdependent entrepreneurs who build social niches in their firm, and both cultivate and mitigate status competition among themselves. This behaviour generates informal social mechanisms that help a flat organization to govern itself. The resulting theory of the collegial organization generalizes its results to partnerships, larger multinational professional services firms, and collegial pockets in flattening bureaucracies.