Social and Economic Networks

[Convenors: Pattison and Robins (ECR) U Melb].

The focus will be on quantitative approaches to the analysis and modelling of social, political and economic networks, and network-based social, political and economic processes. The network in which actors are embedded constitutes a significant aspect of his or her local social context. Network ties link actors to each other as well as to groups, cultural resources, neighbourhoods, and communities, and hence play a potentially significant role in structuring opportunities and constraints. Networks help us understand social dynamics and how local social processes cumulate into population level outcomes. Network structures, their interdependence with the geographical locations of actors, and the dynamics of local processes impact on how locally interactive, context-dependent actions lead to outcomes at higher more aggregated levels. Understanding networks and network-based processes helps us to design ‘complex’ community-level interventions, particularly to induce particular forms of change in behaviour in spatial settings.

Emphasis for project development include the extension of network analysis to:

1. characterising multi-layered social spaces in terms of generalised network structures with self-organising network typologies, with applications to areas such as HIV transmission;
2. developing models of both the dynamics of interactive, location-dependent social processes and for the evolution of social space, with applications to the difference of innovations such as take-up of ICTs across social groups and the settlement hierarchy;
3. combining dynamic modelling approaches with new insights into the typology of social space to model the joint evolution of interdependent social processes at multiple levels of analysis in individual, relational, and group and settings, (for example, in investigating social and institutional capital in community development).