SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND CURRENT NETWORK RESEARCH Anastasia Kavada, University of Westminster
an attempt to outline and critique the claims about the anti-globalization movement and its relationship with the Internet, as well as the network metaphors used to explain them.
...the Internet is thought to influence the characteristics of the movement itself, its structure, ideology and scale.
...network analysis holds to some basic theoretical assumptions, shared by all its practitioners. Central to these assumptions is what Emirbayer and Goodwin call the ‘anticategorical imperative’. “This imperative rejects all attempts to explain human behavior or social processes solely in terms of the categorical attributes of actors, whether individual or collective”
The main thread of criticism concerns the inadequate conceptualization of human agency and culture. In that respect, network analysis is often criticised for its structural determinism, which “neglects altogether the potential causal role of actors’ beliefs, values, and normative commitments” (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994: 1425). Instead, it produces network ‘snapshots’ of social structure through time, paying insufficient attention to the historical mechanisms which dominated their emergence.
... Another problem of social network analysis is “[t]he abstruse terminology and state-of-the-art mathematical sophistication” which seems “to have prevented many of these “outsiders” from venturing anywhere near it.
This line of inquiry is influenced by White’s seminal contributions and considers networks as “crucial environments for the activation of schematas, logics, and frames” (Breiger Forthcoming). “White (1992) considered discursive “narratives” and “stories” to be fundamental to structural pursuits, writing that “stories describe the ties in networks” and that “a social network is a network of meanings” (Ibid). “This perspective prompts a reflection on the relationship between the social networks and the cognitive maps through which actors make sense of and categorize their social environment and locate themselves within broader webs of ties and interactions.”
RAND’s most interesting contribution to the current network literature is their identification of five levels of analysis for netwar actors, which can be used as guidelines for any inquiry into social movement networks.
... A second level that should be examined is the narrative one. This entails an understanding of the narratives or stories that keep the network together. Such narratives “are not simply rhetoric - not simply a "line" with "spin" that is "scripted" for manipulative ends. Instead, these narratives provide a grounded expression of people's experiences, interests, and values” (Ibid). In that respect, stories have two major functions. Firstly, they “express a sense of identity and belonging - of who "we" are, why we have come together, and what makes us different from "them"” (Ibid). Secondly, “stories communicate a sense of cause, purpose, and mission. They express aims and methods as well as cultural dispositions - what "we" believe in, and what we mean to do, and how” (Ibid). Several approaches have been developed to analyze the narrative level, drawing from a broad range of fields, including political discourse, narrative paradigms, agenda setting, metaphors, frames and messages.
The theory of evolving networks is one step towards understanding the way networks are “assembled by reproducing the steps followed by nature when it created its various complex systems” (Ibid). This indicates that the researchers’ interest should shift from describing the topology of networks to understanding the mechanisms that shape their evolution.
