Social network analysis
44. Social movements
Social movements consist of organisations, groups or individuals engaged in collective action with common social or political aims designed to challenge, resist or facilitate social change. Social movements have a long and proud tradition in Greater Manchester with both Marx and Engels writing some of their most significant works here […]
Win a copy of ‘Qualitative Networks: Mixed Methods in Sociological Research’
Qualitative Networks: Mixed methods in sociological research by Elisa Bellotti How do we interact with people in our everyday life? Who are the people we are connected to? What are the consequences of overlapping social circles and how people deal with the potential emerging conflicts? What are the structural and […]
37. Negative ties in social networks
We are all immersed in networks. We have networks of friends, family, and work associates plus many other types of social connection. A social network is a collection of individuals together with a social relationship which connects pairs of people together. Social networking sites such as facebook and LinkedIn are […]
31. Ego-net analysis
Ego-net analysis is one of several approaches to Social Network Analysis. An ego-net is the network which forms around a particular social actor, be that a human actor or a corporate actor, such as an economic firm or national government. In theory it involves all other actors (alters) with whom […]
16. Mixed methods in Social Network Analysis
One of the most powerful aspects of social network data is the fact that they can reproduce social relationships in a formal and comparable way. Relational matrices (which are mathematical grids representing connections) abstract from the hustle and bustle of everyday interaction, and systematise information about social relationships in terms […]
15. Covert networks
Most of the social networks that we study are openly visible traces of interaction and communication between people, which we either observe, gather from archives, or ask people to self-report (for example, neighbourhood networks, friendship networks, policy networks, trade networks, facebook networks). Social network analysis provides us with a range […]
11. Music worlds
The idea of music worlds developed  by Manchester sociologists (Nick Crossley with Wendy Bottero, Siobhan McAndrew, Paul Widdop and Susan O’Shea), builds on Howard Becker’s seminal work on ‘Art Worlds’. Becker views art as ‘collective action’, a collaborative effort involving a complex division of labour and organisational effort (as opposed […]
9. Social networks and militancy: the making of a suffragette
With International Women’s Day taking place on 12 March, we are reminded of the great women of the last century who put their time and energy into the fight for women’s equality. Manchester is the birthplace of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) set up by suffragette leader Emmeline […]
7. Relational Sociology
The idea of ‘relational sociology’ might sound like a tautology. Surely sociology is, by definition, the study of social relations, and therefore ‘relational’? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Nick Crossley’s book Towards Relational Sociology (Routledge 2011), argues that the relationality which ought to be foundational to sociology is very often lost in a […]