Seminar:

This seminar will focus on mastering concepts and understanding substantive applications, rather than implementing programs and algorithms, with the goal of providing a strong theoretical and substantive overview that will serve students who may wish to do empirical work in this area, as well as students with more limited interests. Topics to be covered include historical origins and early development; concepts and methods for the analysis of ego networks; balance theory and triad censuses; network emergence and change; social closure and structural equivalence; small worlds; social influence, contagion and diffusion; and applications in such areas as labor markets, economic and organizational sociology, political sociology; social capital and social support; criminology, and sociology of culture.