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News comes slowly to the north country. We have to give those dog teams a
rest break.
So I belatedly am reading the Sept-Oct issue of the AmSocAssoc Footnotes
in which 77 speciality areas are laid out.
The good news is that Social Networks is one of them.
The puzzling to bad news is that it is list under the Broad category of
Quantitative Approaches (along with math soc, quant soc, stats and
micro-computing).
There are 2 reasons why this is bad:
1. Many social network analysts are qualitative, either ethnographic or
archival.
2. We've spent 30+ years developing social network analysis as a
fundamentally different theoretical approach. Methods are important to
SNA, but only in service of theory.
It would make more sense to me to put SNA in with the broad category of
Theory, Knowledge, Science.
Lynn Smith-Lovin and Jim Ennis were on the ASA committee that did this, so
perhaps they can explain.

 Barry
 _____________________________________________________________________

  Barry Wellman         Professor of Sociology        NetLab Director
  wellman at chass.utoronto.ca  http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman

  Centre for Urban & Community Studies          University of Toronto
  455 Spadina Avenue    Toronto Canada M5S 2G8    fax:+1-416-978-7162
             To network is to live; to live is to network
 _____________________________________________________________________

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