Abstracts and links to articles in PDF format

(see also: Human Complex Systems working papers)

Abstracts and links to 34 articles in PDF format - Douglas R. White

2003 Walter W. Powell, Douglas R. White, Kenneth W. Koput and Jason Owen-Smith. Network Dynamics and Field Evolution: The Growth of Interorganizational Collaboration in the Life Sciences. Submitted to: American Journal of Sociology Download: SFI-WP2003d.pdf

Abstract: We develop and test four alternative logics of attachment - - accumulative advantage, homophily, follow-the-trend, and multiconnectivity - - to account for the development of interorganizational collaboration in the field of biotechnology. The commercial field of the life sciences is characterized by wide dispersion in the sources of basic knowledge and rapid development of the underlying science, fostering collaboration among a broad range of institutionally diverse actors. We map the network dynamics of the field over the period 1988-99. Using multiple novel methods, including analysis of network degree distributions, network visualizations, and multi-probability models to estimate dyadic attachments, we demonstrate how a preference for diversity shapes network evolution. Collaborative strategies pursued by early commercial entrants are supplanted by strategies influenced more by universities, research institutes, venture capital, and small firms. As organizations increase both the number of activities around which they collaborate and the diversity of organizations with which they are linked, cohesive subnetworks form that are characterized by multiple, independent pathways. These structural components, in turn, condition the choices and opportunities available to members of a field, thereby reinforcing an attachment logic based on connection to partners that are diversely and differently linked. The dual analysis of network and institutional evolution offers a compelling explanation for the decentralized structure of this science-based field.

2003 James Moody and Douglas R. White, Social Cohesion and Embeddedness: A Hierarchical Concept of Social Groups. American Sociological Review 68(1):1-25.

Abstract: While questions about social cohesion lie at the core of our discipline, no clear definition of cohesion exists. A definition of social cohesion that leads to an operationalization of social embeddedness based on network connectivity measures cohesiveness as the minimum number k of actors whose absence would disconnect a group. Two members of a group with cohesion level k automatically have at least k different ways of being connected through independent paths. This definition generates hierarchically nested groups, where highly cohesive groups are embedded within less cohesive groups. We discuss the theoretical implications of this definition and demonstrate the empirical applicability of our conception of nestedness by testing the predicted correlates of our cohesion measure within high school friendship and interlocking directorate networks.

Keywords: Graph theory, social networks, algorithmic detection, cohesive groups, social boundaries

2003. Woodrow W. Denham and Douglas R. White Multiple Measures of Alyawarra Kinship, Field Methods, forthcoming. Guest edited by Dwight Read.

Abstract: A field experiment conducted in Central Australia in 1971-72 explored differences between what Aborigines actually did and what they said they did when anthropologists interviewed them. Fieldwork entailed observing behavior and recording it in numerically coded forms; analysis entails extracting patterns computationally that would not appear in traditional ethnographic data. This paper focuses on discrepancies between expected and observed with regard to descent, marriage and kinship. First it examines field methods and the resulting dataset, then it reviews a wide range of analytical methods that have been used to interpret the data. The alternative analytical methods reviewed here serve to test "competing hypotheses" about the nature and operation of Alyawarra descent, marriage and kinship. At the same time, however, the cumulative result of using these diverse methods has been increasingly complex and subtle understandings of previously unknown aspects of Central Australian social organization. The fact that the data continue to repay increasingly sophisticated analyses thirty years after they were recorded attests to the success of the field experiment.

Conclusions:

The Radcliffe-Brown normative model functions as a kind of "cognitive core" for the Alyawarra system of descent, marriage and kinship. It is not incorrect, but it is seriously incomplete and inadequate.

Examination of alternate models of Alyawarra social structure cannot be uniquely resolved into a single model but a nested model with a unique simplest structure embedded in models that are more complex. Each layer of models conforms to actual marriages that are in 98% agreement with the RB section memberships.

The elegance of the Atkins' double helix model is marred by the fact that patterns of marriage among the deceased are quickly forgotten and no longer cast their shadow as a constraint on future behaviors. Thus the "kinship system" can evolve dynamically across a class of network models influenced stochastically by age distributions at marriage in accordance with Tjon Sie Fat's algebraic model, and to incorporate non-Alyawarra lineages in ways that are incompatible with both the RB and the Atkins models, thereby violating the Axiom of Algebraic Closure. An open format model that does not require the assumption of Generational Closure is one of the nested models that provide a good fit to the ethnographic data.

The problem posed by the widespread extra-normative application of Omaha terms led us to discover recurring patterns in Alyawarra behavior that give the people a great deal of discretionary control over marriage by applying Omaha terms non-reciprocally in violation of the Axiom of Universal Reciprocity.

Not only was the field experiment successful, but our findings require some fundamental rethinking of models for Australian kinship.

2003 Douglas R. White and Michael Houseman The Navigability of Strong Ties: Small Worlds, Tie Strength and Network Topology, in Networks and Complexity Special Issue, Complexity 8(1):72-81. SFI Preprint

Abstract: We examine data on and models of small world properties and parameters of social networks. Our focus, on tie-strength, multilevel networks and searchability in strong-tie social networks, allows us to extend some of the questions and findings of recent research and the fit of small world models to sociological and anthropological data on human communities. We offer a ënavigability of strong tiesí hypothesis about network topologies tested with data from kinship systems, and potentially applicable to corporate cultures and business networks.

2003 Douglas R. White Network Analysis and Social Dynamics. Cybernetics and Systems, forthcoming special issue. Edited by Dwight Read.

Abstract. Network analysis, an area of mathematical so-ciology and anthropology crucial to the link-ing of theory and observation, developed dra-matically in recent decades. These develop-ments make possible a theoretical synthesis of social network theory in relation to under-standing social dynamics.

2003 Douglas R. White, Ties, Weak and Strong. Encyclopedia of Community, forthcoming. Edited by Karen Christensen and David Levinson. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Reference.

Abstract. This entry reviews the relationships among the biased networks models of Rapoport, the small-world problem posed by Milgram and later addressed by Watts, and studies of community cohesion in relation to the strength of weak ties hypothesis of Granovetter

2003 Douglas R. White, A Student's Guide to Statistics for Analysis of Cross-Tabulations, submitted to World Cultures.

Abstract. Cross-tabulations of qualitative data are a fundamental tool of empirical research. Their interpretation in terms of testing hypotheses requires a number of relatively simple concepts in statistical analysis that derive from probability theory. When strictly independent events having two characteristics that are independently defined are tabulated in a contingency table, the laws of probability can be used to model, from the marginal totals (rows, columns) of the table, what its cell values would be if the variables were statistically independent. The actual cell values of the frequency table can be used to measure the correlation between the variables (with zero correlation corresponding to statistical independence), they can be compared to expected values under the null hypothesis of statistical independence, and they can be used to give an significance-test estimate of the probability that the departure of the observed correlation from zero (statistical independence) is simply a matter of chance. Further, when the sample of observations departs from strict independence because of observed interactions between them, the correlations between interacting neighbors measured on the same variables can be used to deflate effective sample size in obtaining accurate significance tests.

2003 Douglas R. White, Cross-Cultural Research: An Introduction for Students, submitted to World Cultures.

Abstract. To answer the need for a simplified and comprehensive introduction to Cross-Cultural Research in the context of a classroom in a computer laboratory, this introduction addresses

1 What is Cross-Cultural Research? (with a focus on Cultural coherence or decoherence within and between human communities: human behavior, beliefs, and institutions)

2 A Course in Cross-Cultural Research

3 Goals and Outcome

4 Tools: Spss; Maps and MapTab; Statistics for Galton's Problem

5 Topics and Terms: Lists of Topics; Files; References; Glossary

6 Resources: e.g., On-line articles, e.g., JSTOR "Polygyny"

7 Draft and Final Paper

8 References

9 On-line Resources: Articles from World Cultures journal at http://www.worldcultures.org/

[2002] 1969 George P. Murdock and Douglas R. White, Standard Cross-Cultural Sample: on-line. Reprinted with annotations from Ethnology 8:329-369

Abstract. Since 1969, hundreds of cross-cultural studies have contributed coded data using the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample which is now reprinted here with annotations and guides to the on-line database as published in World Cultures.

2002 Douglas R. White and Frank Harary, Collective Geodesics and Co-evolution: A Graph Theoretic Structural Model. Submitted to Advances in Complex Systems (ACS).

Abstract. Under certain conditions, when diverse individuals (e.g., ants, individuals, agents) independently traverse a sequential decision space in reaching objectives (e.g., as modeled by a maze) they acquire synergetic properties of global problem solving (even in the absence of global knowledge about the problem space) by virtue of some form of pooling experience. The laying of pheromones on random paths taken by ants, for example, has been shown to map the set of shortest paths to a food source. This paper shows the conditions under which certain very general classes of mazes have the property of "collective advantage" to finding shortest paths by aggregating ceretain types random individual behavior (individuals have local but no global knowledge of the maze and no perception or reckoning of network distances). Of three factors considered as conditions for collective advantage, two were identified by Johnson (2000, 2001) from simulations: First is the method of traversal of the maze, and second is the method of marking trails towards a collective solution. The third - the structure of the maze - is explored here through graph theoretic concepts. These include precise definitions, theorems and observations, and simulations. They provide a language and a set of results as to the structural factors that affect collective advantage. In general, biconnected maze networks - where every node has independent paths to every other -, with many parallel paths, and many crossover paths between them, assist collective advantage. Rules developed to measure the collective advantage of a maze help to refocus the problem on the coevolution of the learning environments that endow agents with collective intelligence that is distributed across their behaviors and not condensed by selection for individual actors with better forms of global strategies or global knowledge. Results support March's (1991) findings of advantages to exploratory behaviors over selection for exploitation.

2002 Ulla Johansen and Douglas R. White, Collaborative Long-Term Ethnography And Longitudinal Social Analysis of a Nomadic Clan In Southeastern Turkey . Chapter 4, pp. 81-99, in Chronicling Cultures: Long-Term Field Research in Anthropology, edited by Robert van Kemper and Anya Royce. AltaMira Press.

Abstract. Longitudinal network analysis is coupled in this study to a systematic analysis of the results of long-term ethnography of a nomadic group. Data collection using genealogical, interview and observational methods is complemented by analytic methods using graph theoretic concepts and dynamical as well as structural methods to assess various cross-cutting and hierarchical levels of social cohesion (nuclear and extended families, lineages, clans, tribal groups, and village or nationality affiliations as found within the nomad group) to formulate and test hypotheses about social mobility and political leadership. Predictive hypotheses about the inverse relation between out-mobility and social cohesion versus the direct relation between cultural transmission and marital relinking as a form of cohesion are thought to validate the basic approach. The model of distributed cohesion developed from these data provides a new understanding of processes supporting the emergence of leaders in egalitarian nomadic groups.

2002 Douglas R. White, Emergence, transformation and decay in pastoral nomad socio-natural systems. to appear in Emergence, Transformation and Decay in Socio-Natural Systems, edited by Sander van der Leeuw, Uno Svedin, Tim Kohler, and Dwight Read.

Abstract. A network approach to economic organization, kinship systems and complexity dynamics is used to explore nomadic pastoralism as a socio-natural system. Graph theoretic measures of network cohesion are related to issues of the emergence, transformation and decay of social and economic networks and their sustainability and resilience in relation to the environment and the organization of energy, material, social, and informational flows.

2002 Douglas R. White and Michael Houseman, Taking Sides: From Coherent Practice to Macro Organization. Submitted to American Anthropologist.

Abstract. We show how simple rules shared by actors acting somewhat independently and with local rather than complete global information can nonetheless generate coherent global structures. In the case of dual organization, from analysis of actual marriage networks and genealogical linkages, we find many ethnographic instances where two-sided networks and marriage choices go unnoticed by ethnographers because global labels and descent rules for sides are absent. To understand global structures and institutions that may be at play, unnoticed, in social systems, it is simply not sufficient to look for shared labels attached to the parts of global structure: their structure may reside in patterns of relationships, in their instantiation. What patterns residing in relationships instantiate, however, is not necessarily a set of local decision rules that are shared and identically labeled, but rather sets of local outcomes of behavior that contribute - in possibly heterogeneous even if structurally equivalent ways - to a global configuration.

2001 Douglas R. White (UC Irvine) and Michael Houseman (Paris EPHE) Sidedness: 160 Million Strong? Abstract of presentation for the American Anthropological Association.

2001 Douglas R. White and Frank Harary, The Cohesiveness of Blocks in Social Networks: Node Connectivity and Conditional Density. Sociological Methodology 2001, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 305-359. Blackwell Publishers, Inc., Boston, USA and Oxford, UK. SFI Posting

Abstract. This study shows various ways that formal graph theoretic statements map patterns of network ties into substantive hypotheses about social cohesion. If network cohesion is enhanced by multiple connections between members of a group, for example, then the higher the global minimum of the number of independent paths that connect every pair of nodes in the network, the higher the social cohesion. The cohesiveness of a group is also measured by the extent to which it is not disconnected by removal of 1, 2, 3,..., n actors. Menger's Theorem proves that these two measures are equivalent. Within this graph theoretic framework, we evaluate the family of concepts of cohesion and establish the validity of a pair of related measures:
1. Connectivity - the minimum number k of its actors whose removal would not allow the group to remain connected or would reduce the group to but a single member - measures the social cohesion of a group at a general level.
2. Conditional density measures cohesion on a finer scale as a proportion of ties beyond that required by a graph's connectivity k over the number of ties that would force it to k + 1.

Calibrated for successive values of k, these two measures combine into an aggregate measure of social cohesion, suitable for both small-and large-scale network studies. Using these measures to define the core of a new methodology of cohesive blocking, we offer hypotheses about the consequences of cohesive blocks for social groups and their members, and explore empirical examples that illustrate the significance, theoretical relevance, and predictiveness of cohesive blocking in a variety of substantively important applications in sociology.

2001 Frank Harary and Douglas R. White P-Systems: A Structural Model for Kinship Studies. Connections 24(2):35-46. Click article title at that site for the PDF.

Abstract: Several mathematical models have been proposed for kinship studies. We propose an alternate structural model designed to be so simple logically and intuitively that it can be understood and used by anyone, with a minimum of complication. It is called a P-system, which is short for parental system. The P-system incorporates the best features of each of the previous models of kinship: a single relation of parentage, graphs embedded within the nodes of other graphs, and segregation of higher level descent and marriage structure from nuclear family structure. The latter is also the key conceptual distinction used by LÈvi-Strauss (1969) in the theory of marriage alliance. While a P-system is used to represent a concrete network of kinship and marriage relationships, this network also constitutes a system in the sense that it contains multiple levels where each level is a graph in which each node contains another graph structure. In sum, the connections between the nodes at the outer level in a P-system are especially useful in the analysis of marriage and descent, while at inner level we can describe how individuals are embedded in the kinship structure.

2000 Douglas R. White Manual for Statistical Entailment Analysis. World Cultures 11(1):77-90.

A programmed statistical method developed for the analysis of binary data by the author explicates how to find approximations to discrete Boolean relations of inclusion, mutual exclusion, and collective exhaustion that satisfy empirical conditions for transitivity, and thus which facilitate formulation of rules and generalizations in discrete form ("If ... then ...") that are also logically transitive. Signal detection methods are used to reject relationships that could be due to chance by comparing actual relationships to those found in Monte Carlo simulations of comparable random datasets. The analytic results constitute a discrete network structure of nontrivial empirical implications that characterize a dataset.

2000 Douglas R. White and Karl P. Reitz, Homomorphismos de grafos y semigrupos sobre redes de relaciones. Política y Sociedad 33:149-165. [Reprint in translation of 1983 "Graph and Semigroup Homomorphisms" Social Networks 5:193-234. ]

A set of nodes in a graph are regular-equivalent when each has the same relations with other nodes that are regular-equivalent. For a homomorphic mapping (or blockmodeling) of nodes and arcs into an image that preserves adjacencies, regular equivalence offers the structure-preserving property that semigroups of generating and compound relations on the original graph (or network with multiple kinds of arcs or edges) are preserved.

1999 Douglas R. White, Vladimir Batagelj and Andrej Mrvar, Analyzing Large Kinship and Marriage Networks with Pgraph and Pajek, Social Science Computer Review 17(3):245-274.

The p-graph approach that has proven an invaluable aid to the study of kinship, marriage and genealogical network analysis here is explicated ñ in terms of solving five key conceptual problems of network studies, including that of identifying subgroup boundaries -- and combined with a computer package for sparse-network algorithmic analysis and visual representation of large (up to 90,000 node) networks. The results of this new marriage between graph-theoretical analysis, computer science, network anthropology and network-visualized social history are illustrated for a 1600- person social system consisting of an entire Turkish nomad society, with a relinking density of 75%, the highest density of structural endogamy yet recorded. It is shown how the algorithmic, analytic and graph-editing technology of this new concatenation of elements for network analysis leads to striking new understandings of social structure and social processes, and how to prepare visualizations of discoverable emergent properties of structure in such a large and dense network. This article reviews the developments and contributions of the authors to the evolution of these tools and methods for large-scale network analysis, and provides a complete series of guides and illustrations for the reader to utilize the two software packages discussed.

1999 Douglas R. White, Networks, Cognition and Ethnography: Thomas Schweizer Remembered, Connections 22:19-27.

Abstract: The life and research agenda of Thomas Schweizer, who died suddenly at the age of 48, is considered in terms of its contributions to anthropology and social science generally. Schweizer was the leading contributor to a processual approach to understanding the fundamentals of ethnographic research through a synthesis between the network approach to social organization and an actor based approach that takes into account cognition and individual decision making under the network constraints and dynamics of social organization. This memorial considers how this synthesis developed within Schweizer's career and his institutional and intellectual contributions to German Anthropology and the University of Cologne Institute of Ethnology.

1997 Lilyan A. Brudner and Douglas R. White. Class, Property and Structural Endogamy: Visualizing Networked Histories Theory and Society 25:161-208.

Abstract. This is the first theoretical application of the concept of structural endogamy as identifying an empirical variable or boundary condition within social networks that is linked in causal-explanatory ways to social class formation. Using an ethnographically rich case study of an Austrian village in which oral and (ca. 100) household genealogies provide 150 years of marriage network data, while manorial archives continue the stem-line household genealogies back to the founding of the "house system" in 1517, the hypothesis is formulated that the social class boundary between farmstead owner-operators (including heirs and buyers) and secondary service occupations not linked to farmstead ownership is established and maintained through the mechanism of structural endogamy. Two principles of inheritance are in conflict in this farmstead house-system, that of passing the principal productive property intact to a principal heir (usually a son, or if not is available, a daughter), and that of the intestate rights of children to equal division of parental inheritance. The use of wills or testaments resolves his conflict through "equitable division" which maintains stem-line impartibility of farmsteads along with quitclaims to those who are not principal heirs. Structural endogamy, in this case specifically the marriage of a potential heir to a spouse who brings in divided property from another divided patrimonial stemline, is shown to be (1) a qualification for class membership via principal heirship, (2) a means of reconstituting subdivided estates, and (3) a means of social perpetuation of the two-class system which often even divides siblings within the same nuclear family. The predicted statistical relationship between class-membership, heirship and structural endogamy is confirmed empirically and implications for new approaches to studies of social class formation are discussed.

1997 Douglas R. White and Patrick Gray, Corr-Rel: A Program for Reliability Assessment. World Cultures 9(1): 58- 75.

A co-authored methodological guide to software written by the first author assesses the classical problems of determining (1) unidimensionality of multiple measures of the same construct as a prerequisite to assessing reliability, (2) item and multiple-item scale reliability and (3) the reliability of estimates for individual cases.

1988 Large-Scale Network of World Economy: Social scientists use the CRAY
Interview: Douglas R. White, David A. Smith. Science at the San Diego Supercomputer Center 1987: 27-28

The following articles in pdf format are found at JSTOR, for which you will need access from campus or your library password:
http://www.jstor.org/search/cc99331a.10221690180/1-6?configsortorder=SCORE&frame=noframe&dpi=3&config=jstor

Structure and Dynamics of the Global Economy: Network Analysis of International Trade 1965-1980 David A. Smith, Douglas R. White Social Forces, Vol. 70, No. 4. (Jun., 1992), pp. 857-893.jstor
pw/GlobalEcon1992.pdf

Using Galois Lattices to Represent Network Data Linton C. Freeman, Douglas R. White Sociological Methodology, Vol. 23. (1993), pp. 127-146. jstor
pw/Galois.pdf

Representing and Computing Kinship: A New Approach (in Reports) Douglas R. White, Paul Jorion Current Anthropology, Vol. 33, No. 4. (Aug. - Oct., 1992), pp. 454-463. jstor
pw/White-Jorion1992.pdf

Rethinking Polygyny: Co-Wives, Codes, and Cultural Systems Douglas R. White Current Anthropology, Vol. 29, No. 4. (Aug. - Oct., 1988), pp. 529-572. jstor
pw/Polygyny1988.pdf

The Shared Workstation Applications Project (in Reports) Douglas R. White Current Anthropology, Vol. 29, No. 3. (Jun., 1988), pp. 519-520. jstor
pw/SWAP1988.pdf

Cross-Cultural Surveys Today Michael L. Burton, Douglas R. White Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 16. (1987), pp. 143-160. jstor
pw/XCS1987.pdf