Craig M. Rawlings

Making the connection: Social bonding in courtship situations

Sociologists have long argued that the force of a social bond resides in a sense of interpersonal connection. This is especially true for initial courtship encounters when pairs report a sense of interpersonal chemistry. The authors explore the process of romantic bonding by applying interaction ritual theory, extended and integrated with methods from computational linguistics, to the study of courtship encounters and, specifically, heterosexual speed dating. The authors find that the assortment of interpersonal moves associated with a sense of connection characterizes a conventionalized form of initial courtship activity. The game is successfully played when females are the point of focus and engaged in the conversation and males demonstrate alignment with and understanding of the female. In short, initial heterosexual courtship encounters are associated with a sense of bonding when they reflect a reciprocal asymmetrical performance in which differentiated roles are mutually coordinated.

Methodological Transactionalism and the Sociology of Education

The development and spread of research methods in sociology can be understood as a story about the increasing sophistication of tools in order to better answer fundamental disciplinary questions. In this chapter, we argue that recent developments, related to both increased computing power and data collection ability along with broader cultural shifts emphasizing interdependencies, have positioned Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a powerful tool for empirically studying the dynamic and processual view of schooling that is at the heart of educational theory. More specifically, we explore how SNA can help us both better understand as well as reconceptualize two central topics in the sociology of education: classroom interaction and status attainment. We conclude with a brief discussion about possible future directions network analysis may take in educational research, positing that it will become an increasingly valuable research approach because our ability to collect streaming behavioral and transactional data is growing rapidly.

‘Making names’: The cutting edge renewal of African art in New York City, 1985–1996

Abstract This paper reconstructs a turning point in the symbolic production of African art as a fine art genre, when a ‘new’ variant was filtered into the market. This process is seen as part of the overall struggle of ‘making names’ — enacted by critics, curators, and dealers — that structures recognition, results in artistic change, and reproduces central distinctions in the fine art world. Informed by Bourdieus formulation of cultural fields, the study is grounded in numerous sources, including fieldwork observations, secondary data analyses, a review of more than three hundred exhibitions, and interviews with key art world agents. To begin, the social organization of the mid-1980s New York art market is outlined as a spatial economy of name recognition, broadly composed of three agonistic segments. Afterward, the incorporation of a new African art into organizational and discursive structures is examined as the outcome of ongoing struggles between competing ‘position-takings’. Symbolic and material exigencies within the art market motivating the selection of such works, as well as specific strategies used in framing them as creations of disinterested individuals, are also examined.

The structural balance theory of sentiment networks: Elaboration and test

Structural balance theory attends to a group’s network of sentiments and posits that this network alters over time toward particular structural forms. Current work on the theory is focused on understanding the mechanisms that alter sentiments as a function of the configuration of sentiments in which they are embedded. Although the theory assumes tension reduction mechanisms, there has been no effort to directly measure and model the temporal changes of individuals’ relational tensions that are predicted by the theory. This article elaborates and tests balance theory with an empirical analysis of its posited interpersonal tensions and their reductions via a sentiment conversion process. In addition, the authors open a new line of inquiry on the theory’s scope conditions and point to a community commitment condition that is involved in the realization of structural balance. Their analysis draws on a unique suite of multiwave measures obtained from the Urban Communes Data Set.

Culture in NetworksCulture in Networks, by McLeanPaul. Malden, MA: Polity, 2016. 235 pp.

A certain type of young scholar will breathe a sigh of relief when they read Paul McLean’s excellent overview Culture in Networks and they feel that important sense of having found an intellectual home. This is a book that succinctly summarizes the history and main contours of a subfield that has often been folded into either social network analysis or cultural sociology; but imperfectly so, because it is not really either of these, or perhaps because it is both (sort of). Scholars doing the type of work covered in McLean’s survey of the literature, when asked, ‘‘what is your research area?’’ and trying to articulate something beyond the ‘‘networks and culture’’ refrain, might say something like ‘‘I study how people form ties and influence each other, and how categories, schema, beliefs, etc., shape and are shaped by such processes—oh, and sometimes I study the network-like properties of discourse as well,’’ to which the scholar would risk getting the quite reasonable response, ‘‘oh, you mean you study all of sociology?’’ Well, yes, and no. Of course, most scholars in this area don’t do all of the things McLean covers; but a surprising number actually do, and, more importantly, McLean helps make clear why these topics are connected for good theoretical and methodological reasons. McLean does a superb job in defining the subfield in a way that embraces its inherent substantive breadth and theoretical depth, tracing its theoretical lineage, areas of inquiry, and methodological approaches, while at the same time showing its cohesive core and unifying questions. What at first may appear an overly squishy research area to the uninitiated, or simply an excuse to not commit to a more substantively anchored research agenda, is shown to be a vibrant ‘‘invisible college’’ of its own with ongoing lines of inquiry building on prior efforts, containing unresolved puzzles ripe for future research trajectories. McLean begins by separately conceptualizing networks (a relatively straightforward task) and then culture (a necessarily more difficult one), each with an eye to the necessity of the other in understanding a wide array of social phenomena. Thus, from the outset, the book powerfully argues that those seeking ‘‘pure’’ structural or cultural approaches are missing key central organizing dualities of social life. The majority of the book is then devoted to chapters showing a number of ways that culture and networks idealtypically interrelate. Although the title contains the somewhat obtuse preposition ‘‘in,’’ the breadth is more than this implies. A large amount of work in this area concerns how networks are ‘‘pipes’’ or ‘‘channels’’ or ‘‘hardware’’ for the incubation, propagation, and spread of culture, which McLean covers as Culture through Networks; but McLean shows how such metaphors are ‘‘deceptively clear’’ and uses several other prepositions to get at the depth and nuance of the structureculture linkages: Networks from Culture (and vice versa), and Networks of Culture. Including this final topic shows McLean’s truly catholic approach to the topic, by (rightfully in my view) including in the subfield those scholars using formal methods of cultural analysis—that is, network-type approaches to examine texts, institutional discourse, and so forth. The empirical topics range from relatively straightforward network studies of innovation diffusion to cutting-edge work in computational linguistics, covering numerous substantive areas including social movements, the sociology of science, and digital media. But McLean continually returns to the uniting principle that relations among social entities are the proper basis of understanding society, and network analysis is a formalization of this principle and not an end in itself. In short, Culture in Networks is an unapologetically sociological account of structure and culture. In this regard, the book stands apart from recent efforts attempting to introduce and give overviews of ‘‘network science’’ in ways that tend to Reviews 347

22.95 paper. ISBN: 9780745687179.

Our focus is on methods of cultural analysis, and specifically on those methods that are formal in the sense that they rely upon the purposeful gathering (or simulating) of cultural data and a systematic analysis that involves at least some mathematically based technique. The meaning of culture is more complex, as scholars have understood cultural phenomena in very different ways across the decades and across the disciplines. These different goals in cultural analysis give rise to different types or styles of formal methods of cultural analysis. We briefly review the history of these methods in the social sciences and conclude with a description of some of the main arenas within which formal methods of cultural analysis are being deployed and actively developed today.