Quantitative Methods in the
Social Sciences 2

SOCIAL INTERACTIONS AND SOCIAL NETWORKS

Power, decision-making and social networks

25 - 27 August, Dublin, Ireland

Call for Papers
This seminar is organized jointly by Diane Payne (University College Dublin) and Christofer Edling (Jacobs University, Germany) as part of the European Science Foundation’s network programme to support research in quantitative social sciences (QMSS 2). Like earlier seminars in this series, this seminar is small-scale and attendance is by invitation only. Researchers in this field, and in particular early-stage researchers, are strongly encouraged to submit a paper proposal for this forthcoming QMSS seminar. Successful applicants will receive full travel and accommodation costs for the duration of the seminar.

Seminar Topic
Social network studies of power and decision making focus the research analysis on the dynamic social interactions between actors embedded in collective action scenarios. There is a long tradition of studying elite power in organizational decision making and policy networks. For example, studies of interlocking directorships are used to explore how social ties between members of corporate boards may facilitate political cohesion, more so than shared economic interests or geographical location. In the policy network studies, researchers focus on the formation of state-interest organization networks, their persistence and change over time, and the consequences of network structures for public policy-making outcomes, as well as the consequences of the embedded nature of policy making for alternative collective decision processes such as persuasion, vote trading or coercion. Numerous structural accounts of collective movements such as protest movements and others point to findings which suggest how individual ties combine into more complex network patterns, to affect the proportion of people willing to contribute to a cause, or the intensity of participation in a certain population. The more recent debate on the role of computer mediated communication (CMC) in the social movement literature asks whether the opportunities available through this new medium of communication is capable of creating new social ties or just the enhancement of existing ‘real’, ‘face-to-face’, ties.

Over the years network studies of political and economic elites, collective decision making in public and private spheres, collective movements and other related areas, have demonstrated various levels of correlation between different types of network structures and actor behaviour and group outcomes. However more recently ‘it has been increasingly argued that we ought to look for mechanisms rather than correlations, i.e., we should clarify how do networks really operate’, and what impact they have on actor choices and group performance. In this regard, broadly speaking, there two different schools of thought, the rationalist and structuralist perspectives, which each claim superior explanations on the basis of network-type effects. The structuralist perspective claims that social behaviour occurs or is embedded in the context of local patterns of relationships, which constrain or enable actors towards certain options, at the expense of other options, for example such as choices about who to influence, persuade or coerce in a collective decision making process. On the other hand, the rationalist perspective also suggests that actors make interdependent decisions in the sense that as actor A is rational and must take account of what actor B may do, and since actor B is also assumed to be rational, this will also depend on what actor A will do. For the rationalist, the meaning of a social tie between actors in the network is that these actors can expect to have future social interaction with each other. In collective action situations, where actors are interdependent on each other with regard to achieving their goals, the rationalist approach argues that actors will behave differently depending on whether the actor interaction (e.g. actor game) is perceived as one-shot activity (e.g. Prisoner’s Dilemma game) or is perceived as likely to be repeated again over time (e.g. Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma). Actor ties in a social network hold the promise of future social interaction: they effectively provide the actors with a potential opportunity to sanction or reward each others’ behaviour into the future, thereby encouraging co-operative behaviour now.

However, we might ask what of those situations where despite the future prospect of repeated interactions, actors do not behave in a cooperative manner and instead the exercise of coercive power is observed in the collective process? Or what of those situations where the emergence of collective action is better described by processes of persuasion and trust via interaction with well-resourced, well-informed actors, rather than exchange and bargaining across the range of actors in the social network? Network researchers now argue that while there is extensive network literature on the different kinds of actor interaction, moving forward more research is needed to explore the relative importance of these different types of interaction (e.g. social exchange) under different contexts of actor interdependency (e.g. functional, structural and/or cognitive interdependencies). No longer is it sufficient to assume that the effect of networks on behaviour is context-independent. For example, trust between policy actors underpins reciprocal exchange in policy networks but trust and the accompanying norms are undermined each time actors threaten to apply external legal sanctions to enforce the co-operative behaviour. The challenge which now faces researchers interested in power and decision making in social networks is to unravel the interaction effects of the different forms of social interaction and exchange in the collective process under examination.

Schedule of the Seminar
The seminar runs over 3 days and comprises 4 sessions, with the first session taking place in the afternoon of 25 August 2010 and the final session in the morning of 27 August 2010. Each of the sessions will be introduced by a senior scholar as an invited key note speaker. Up to five additional papers in each of the four sessions may be presented. The organizers plan to collect the best papers in a book to be published after the conference.

The four sessions are interrelated, looking at different aspects of the seminar topic ‘Power, Decision Making and Social Networks’:

• Session 1 focuses on Social Movements and Collective Action problems;

• Session 2 looks at issues of Networks and Governance, which can include studies of policy networks and collective decision making;

• Session 3 explores broader conceptual and/or modeling issues with regard to how to take account of the Context and Structure of social interaction;

• Session 4 takes a broad focus on the interrelationships between Organizations (both public and private), Corporate Networks and the exercise of Power.

How to submit a proposal?
Researchers, in particular early-stage researchers, are strongly encouraged to apply. The proposals should have a title, an abstract not exceeding 500 words and the coordinates of the applicant. It should cover main hypotheses, data, methodology and expected conclusions.

The proposals should be sent, by no later than 18 June, 2010, to the organizers Diane.Payne@ucd.ie and christofer.edling@sociology.su.se. Travel and accommodation costs will be provided for the selected participants. There is no registration fee for this seminar.

Provisional Programme