Explorations in Structural Analysis (RLE Social Theory)

Download or read book Explorations in Structural Analysis (RLE Social Theory) written by Ronald L. Breiger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-21 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when most of the innovative techniques in empirical sociology concern themselves with networks of relations among variables (such as indices of occupational prestige, education and income), the central theme of this volume is that there is much substantive insight and analytical leverage to be gained from a conceptualization of social structure directly, as regularities in the patterning of relations among concrete entities. The view adopted here is that variate distributions measure selected consequences of structural pattern (of the actual connections among individuals or organizations) and, as such, they are useful indicators of questions to be asked in analyzing social structures directly, but they are neither descriptions nor analyses of the structure itself.