Social Networks of Meaning and Communication

In Social Networks of Meaning and Communication, Jan A. Fuhse offers a coherent theory of social structures as networks of relations interwoven with meaning. Drawing upon and extending the relational sociology of Harrison White and Charles Tilly, Fuhse seeks to establish a theory of social networks. Using a broad range of classic and contemporary social theory, he reconceptualizes social networks as constituted in patterns of expectations that form, reproduce, and change over the course of communicative events. These events, he argues, are the basic building blocks of the social world. They lead to expectations about the behavior of actors and their interaction with others ? the meaning structure making for observable regularities of communication in social networks. Social Networks of Meaning and Communication lays out a relational and constructivist perspective of social networks, highlighting a number of implications for social relationships, groups, and collective actors, as well as ethnic categories and cultural differences, roles and institutions, gender and family relations, and methods of social network analysis. Its framework bridges the gap in social network research between technically sophisticated analyses and complex, elusive theorizing.

Autorentext

Jan A. Fuhse, Senior Lecturer (Privatdozent), Humboldt University of Berlin Jan A. Fuhse is interim professor in sociology at Technical University Chemnitz, Germany, and a senior lecturer (Privatdozent) at Humboldt University. After his PhD in sociology from Universität Stuttgart (Germany) in 2007, he completed a post-doc (funded by the Alexander von Humboldt foundation) at Columbia University 2007-2008. There he worked with Harrison White and Charles Tilly on the theory of social networks. From 2009 to 2013 he was an assistant professor of political sociology at the University of Bielefeld, completing his Habilitation in 2011. From 2013 to 2018, Fuhse worked as a Heisenberg Fellow (funded by the German Research Association) at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. From 2019 to 2021, he filled interim professorships in sociology and communication studies at the Universities of Passau and Bremen.

Inhalt

Preface 1. Networks with Theory 2. Networks, Relationships, and Meaning 3. Groups and Social Boundaries 4. Ethnic Categories and Cultural Differences 5. Roles and Institutions 6. Love and Gender 7. Events in Networks 8. Networks from Communication 9. Summary and Discussion References Index