I recently completed Lin Freeman’s book on the history of social network analysis—I strongly recommend it. This is a first hand account by one of the remarkable figures and driving forces of the field, and the result is both insightful and personal.
The book is temporally organized, beginning with the prehistory of social network analysis. It does a superb job of weaving together threads of the antecedents of social network analysis pre-1930s (going well beyond Simmel, to Comte, Huber, Hobson, Almack, Galton, Botts, and others). It then turns to the “modern” age of social network analysis, beginning with Moreno’s work on sociometry, and then to the work of Homans and others in the 1930s. It then moves through the “dark ages” of the 1940s to 60s, to the “renaissance” of social network analysis, in part driven by Harrison White and students in the 1970s.
There are a number of things that make this a must read for those invested in the field. First, I think it offers an expansive intellectual history of the area that is simply not available anywhere else. Second, it offers a view of the personalities and the relationships within the field—e.g., that Moreno was a difficult personality, and that this may have played a role in the progress (or lack thereof) in sociometry. Further, the tracing of the personal and professional pedigrees of the key actors in the field was really quite powerful (accentuated by pictures of many of the key characters).
I do have a few minor quibbles. For example, the characterization of the 1940s to 1960s as the “dark ages,” I think, is unfair. Now, he means a very particular thing by this description, which is the lack of a self-aware school of thought based on the “structuralist perspective” on networks, which may be reasonably accurate. However, much of the most creative work in social network analysis (which he discusses)—from Newcomb to Festinger to Bavelas) was done in this period. In fact, it may have been the very lack of a self-aware paradigm that helped the field move forward during this time. A smaller quibble, btw, is that he does not do justice to Newcomb’s contributions to the field. I would say, with his studies on Bennington, and later Michigan, students are some of the landmarks in the field. In this same vein, I would have been very interested in a discussion of why social network analysis moved from largely social psychological moorings in the 1950s (think Festinger, Newcomb, and others) to largely sociological by the 1970s. Even the social network perspective on social influence, such a natural fit, largely drifted out of psychology, kept alive within sociology by Friedkin and Johnsen and others, and, to a certain extent, by Huckfeldt and Sprague and collaborators in political science. It is an intriguing question, with particular resonance today, as the disciplines interested in social network analysis are shifting significantly in the present (as discussed in earlier blog entries).
An additional puzzle, in thinking about the sequel to this book decades in the future, is that social network analysis, I believe, is shifting away from the structuralist paradigm of constraining, slow changing social networks, to a more dynamic or even episodic view of interactions.
In any case, this is a wonderful book—interesting and enjoyable to anyone who is deeply interested in the emergence and evolution of social network analysis over the last 100 years.
Linton Freeman. 2004. The Development of Social Network Analysis: A Study in the Sociology of Science, Vancouver, BC: Empirical Press.
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