Social Networks of Meaning and Communication

In Social Network of Meaning and Communication, Jan Fuhse offers a theoretical account of social networks to explore both what they are and how they matter in the social world. Drawing upon and extending the cutting-edge work of Harrison White and Charles Tilly, Fuhse takes an important step forward in establishing a new theory of social networks, reconceptualizing networks as constituted in patterns of meaning with a dynamic set of expectations that form, reproduce, and change over the course of communicative events.

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.