I spent today tying to put some theoretical work in the context of my observations about economic and political change in East Asia over the last 150 years. In particular, I’ve been working through my reading and thinking about network society (see an earlier post), social network analysis, economic sociology and structuration theory. My hope is to develop a scalable network centric view of the world that can then be used to guide the empirical description of the changes in China that interest me.

I believe that all readings of the world and driven by our preconceptions (however they way be dressed up) so it is important to enunciate them carefully at the outset of any empirical work. My interest in working on the theory is to enable me to, with the one consistent lens, view a fuller range of related phenomena.

I have decided that we can broadly conceive of the world through a network topology. At times, though, this network may look linear and hierarchical, and the more complex structures mostly latent. At other times, in more fluid societies, the network will be much less linear and hierarchical. Economic sociology and social network analysis can help us identify the nature and strength of links between nodes in the network.

Using an understanding of the strength of ties we can see how the network is structurated to develop rigidities. Pressures from outside the network, or changes in the strength of ties between key nodes can lead to changes in the structure of the network.

As I noted above, this kind of approach is potentially scalable. So, for example, the same theory and method could be applied to examining the change in economic and social relations between groups of university friends moving into the workforce or the shifting alliances of hi-tech firms seeking to dominate new markets.

I’m working on this to apply to a couple of pieces of continuing research, examini changes in the structure of Chinese society (in particular changing social class hierarchies and changing industry structures).