- The meaningful family subgroups are not unilineal descent groups but sets of cognates that are more densely intermarried, through various kinds of relinking.
- Structural endogamy based on relinking is associated with wealth consolidation and thus with higher prestige.
- Structural cohesion added by sibling and sibling-in-law links reinforced by structural endogamy is associated with consolidation of wealth from different ancestral sources.
- Reconsolidation of wealth through relinking marriages is more likely the greater the number of siblings because this entails the division of family inheritance amongst a greater number of heirs. Relinking marriages will be less important when there is a single child as heir.
- The type of relinking that is most important to membership in the prestige core of the marriage network is not the marriage between blood (consanguineal) relatives, but horizontal relinking between families and sibling sets, which resemble cycles of endogamous marriage among sets of families.
Abstracts and links to 57 articles in PDF format - Douglas R. White
2005 Jason Owen-Smith, Walter W. Powell, and Douglas R. White.
Network Growth and Consolidation: The Effects of Cohesion and Diversity on the Biotechnology Industry Network
Submitted Forthcoming in Management Science , Special issue on Complex Systems Across Disciplines.
Download: 
Growth_andConsolidation.pdf
2005 Douglas R. White, Artemy Malkov, and Andrey Korotayev.
World Population: Trends, Mechanisms, Singularities
Submitted to Science
Download:
WorldPopulations.pdf
2005 Douglas R. White, Artemy Malkov, and Andrey Korotayev.
The Periodic Theory of Elements for World Population
Submitted to Structure and Dynamics
Download:
FoersterShort1.pdf
reviewed 2005 in Europhysicsnews 36(6):218-220:
2006 Douglas R. White, Natasa Kejzar,
Constantino Tsallis, Doyne Farmer, and Scott White.
Download:
A Generative Model for Feedback Networks (including trade, biotech, kinship)
Physical Review E 73, 016119 abstract
http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0508028
Santa Fe Institute Working Paper 2005
paj file 1250-0-2-0
Edge Based Model simulation for
alpha = 0 (start), beta=1.9 (distance decay), gamma = 0 (route), N=500, steps of 15 shown in figures with
black lines as tree-like links to new nodes, red lines are feedback links
at various (clickable) distances. See Working Papers Series
for the Social Dynamics and Evolution group for full color preprint as well as an interactive conference PDF by Kejzar.
2005 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. Forthcoming: American
Journal of Sociology 110(4) January
electronic edition
Download:
SFI-WP2003d.pdf See link to movies at
Barabasi site
Abstract: We develop and test, using McFadden's discrete choice statistical modeling applied to network dynamics, 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.
2004 Douglas R. White, Jason Owen-Smith, James Moody, and Walter W. Powell
Networks, Fields and Organizations: Micro-Dynamics, Scale and Cohesive Embeddings.
http://journals.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=5273175
Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory 10(1):95-117.
Special issue on Mathematical Representations and Models for the Analysis of Social
Networks within and between Organizations, Guest Editors Alessandro Lomi and Phillipa Pattison.
Download:
SFI-WP2004-03-09
Keywords: Graph theory, social networks, algorithmic detection, cohesive network topologies, fields, organizations, micro-macro linkages.
Abstract: Social action is situated in fields that are simultaneously composed of interpersonal ties and relations among organizations, which are both usefully characterized as social networks. We introduce a novel approach to distinguishing different network macro-structures in terms of cohesive subsets and their overlaps. We develop a vocabulary that relates different forms of network cohesion to field properties as opposed to organizational constraints on ties and structures. We illustrate differences in probabilistic attachment processes in network evolution that link on the one hand to organizational constraints versus field properties and to cohesive network topologies on the other. This allows us to identify a set of important new micro-macro linkages between local behavior in networks and global network properties. The analytic strategy thus puts in place a methodology for Predictive Social Cohesion theory to be developed and tested in the context of informal and formal organizations and organizational fields. We also show how organizations and fields combine at different scales of cohesive depth and cohesive breadth. Operational measures and results are illustrated for three organizational examples, and analysis of these cases suggests that different structures of cohesive subsets and overlaps may be predictive in organizational contexts and similarly for the larger fields in which they are embedded. Useful predictions may also be based on feedback from level of cohesion in the larger field back to organizations, conditioned on the level of multiconnectivity to the field.
2004 Douglas R. White
Social Scaling: From scale-free to stretched exponential models for scalar stress, hierarchy,
levels and units in human and technological networks and evolution. ISCOM working paper.
For submission to: Computer and Mathematical Organization Theory
Download:
1982scalingDRW.pdf
Abstract: Johnson's (1982) model of scalar stress deals with how networks are stacked at different levels to reduce information and energy load by substituting relationships among leaders of hierarchically ordered groups for relationships among members of larger groups at a lower level in the hierarchy. The logic and scaling results of this model are important elements in a theory of network and social scaling. They point to the possibility of scale-free modeling of the modularity of networks based on the relative constancy of the basic units at the individual level that give structure to these networks, the flexibility of how particular groups are organized, the fact that network hierarchies are population-filling with scale-free relationships to population size, and the bulking, organization and conservation of energy, information and material in ways that match the constraints on populations of individuals. These characteristics of scale-free modeling have been successful in biology, and social scaling may well follow the same principles. This article suggests the kinds of modifications that made be needed for larger-scale integrative projects in social scaling.
Hierarchical and power law models have been much debated in recent decades and their limitations exposed. While Johnson's work contains important insights, this paper examines new types of models that account for observed attenuations in the finite regimes of scale-free distributions (the stretched exponential model) and broken scale-free regimes. A combination of stretched exponentials and network modeling is found to be a productive approach to social and economic scaling that yields theoretical predictions about basal units, moments of distributions, regime attenuation and broken regimes.
Studies of scale-free, cutoff, and hierarchical properties of the U.S. airlines network in 1997 and a physics citation network are used to compare Johnson's findings with basal unit and scale-free regimes in a more general scaling model that uses the stretched exponential. This model estimates hierarchy levels and basal unit characteristics and finds a similar basal unit of 6 for renormalization at a second level (hubs for local neighborhoods) in the airline industry, suggestive of Johnson's results. The citation network suggests three-levels of multiplicative effects and a basal unit of 3 that is well under Johnson''s limit of 6 but constitutes a minimum unit of social cohesion.
2002 Douglas R. White and Michael
Houseman The Navigability of
Strong Ties: Small Worlds, Tie Strength and Network Topology,
in Networks and Complexity
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 ***navigability of strong ties***
hypothesis about network topologies tested with data from kinship
systems, and potentially applicable to corporate cultures and
business networks.
2004 Douglas R. White Network
Analysis and Social Dynamics.
Cybernetics and Systems 35(2-3):173-192,
Abstract. Network analysis, an area of mathematical anthropology
and sociology crucial to the linking of theory and observation, developed dramatically in recent decades.
This made possible a new understanding of social dynamics as a synthesis of network theories.
Concrete links can be identified between the actions of self-reflective agents, with rich information
processing and decision processes deeply embedded in social worlds, and emergence or change in the
self-restructuring systems they operate -- including the emergence of organizations, groups,
institutions, norms and cultures.
2003 Douglas R. White, Ties,
Weak and Strong. Encyclopedia of Community Vol. 4:1376-1379.
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
1998 Michael Houseman and Douglas R. White,
Network Mediation of
Exchange Structures: Ambilateral Sidedness and Property Flows in Pul Eliya.
Kinship, Networks and Exchange, Chapter 4, pp. 58-88.
Edited by Thomas Schweizer and Douglas R. White.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Abstract.
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.
2003 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.
2001
Douglas R. White (UC Irvine) and Michael Houseman (Paris EPHE)
Sidedness: 160 Million Strong? Abstract of
presentation for the American Anthropological Association.
1974 Douglas R. White
Mathematical Anthropology.
Reprinted from J.J. Honigmann, ed.,
Handbook of Social and Cultural Anthropology:69-446
Erratta
Abstract. under development
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 publisher posting:
Theory and Society
26:161-208. Reprinted at eScholarship
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.
Reviewer comments.
One paper, that by Brudner and White, does appear to break new methodological ground and seems to me to be distinguished on theoretical and historical grounds as well. The Brudner/White method for analyzing longitudinal large-scale social networks has perhaps solved a problem that has eluded the discipline for many years. Brudner and White go further than demonstrating a new method: they show that they can speak to and articulate with a broad range of classical and contemporary theoretical problems. This paper, previously published as well in Theory and Society, would warrant republication if there was no other published work describing this method. Of all the papers submitted for consideration, I found this one to be the freshest and most interesting, in part because it spoke to debates that are actually considered in the current theoretical landscape of sociology.
1988 Large-Scale
Network of World Economy: Social scientists use the CRAY
The following articles in pdf format
are found at JSTOR,
for which you will need access from campus or your library
password:
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
Representing and Computing Kinship:
A New Approach Douglas R. White, Paul Jorion
Current Anthropology, Vol. 33, No. 4. (Aug. - Oct., 1992),
pp. 454-463. jstor
A Cross-Cultural Historical Analysis of Subsistence Change.
Candice Bradley; Carmella C. Moore; Michael L. Burton; Douglas R. White
American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 92, No. 2. (Jun., 1990), pp. 447-457.
Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7294%28199006%292%3A92%3A2%3C447%3AACHAOS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O
Special Issue,
Complexity 8(1):72-81. SFI
Preprint eScholarship Reprint
2002. Narda Alcantara Valverde, Silvia Casasola Vargas, and Douglas R. White.
The Marriage Core of the Elite Network of Colonial Guatemala.
Abstract.
Following Houseman and White's definition of the core of a marriage network, we identify the core of the elite network of families colonial Guatemala in the period 1680 and 1800 in structural terms, ones related both to the concept of marriage relinking, used in research on the social organization of cognatic societies, and to the concept of wealth consolidation through structural endogamy. To test hypotheses about the relationship between the structural core of relinked marriages and the consolidation of wealth and prominence in a sample of elites in the richly documented dataset assembled by Casasola (1998, 2001), we develop a second measure of the prestige core of a marriage network, and measure the correlations between the two measures. The second measure uses the notion of network redundancy (White, 1998), in this case, redundancy between husband and wife in the accumulation of prestigious family names. This set of definitions is useful describe the structure and dynamics of cognatic descent groups, such as the Spanish kinship system. We find support for the following hypotheses:
online journal, special issue. Edited by Dwight Read. Introduction by
Murray Leaf
Interview: Douglas R. White, David A. Smith. Science at
the San Diego Supercomputer Center 1987: 27-28
http://www.jstor.org/search/cc99331a.10221690180/1-6?configsortorder=SCORE&frame=noframe&dpi=3&config=jstor
pw/GlobalEcon1992.pdf
pw/White-Jorion1992.pdf