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chris -

have a look at duncan watts' chapter in the
current annual review of sociology.

regards, al
=============
On Thu, 10 Feb 2005, Chris McCarty wrote:

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>
> I will be interested to see over the next few years in which journals these physicists publish this research and which conferences they attend. There is no doubt that they are making a contribution. However there is at least one example of a physicist who is now in a Sociology department and making a career as a sociologist. Even if you are a physicist, if you end up tenured in a sociology department I would think you would check those juornals before publishing.
>
> I'm also convinced that the physicists will eventually come to the conclusion that their research programs, as interesting as they are, can be informed by social science data collection. If you aren't careful you may wake up one day and find that you are more a sociologist than a physicist, which is OK with me. I'm fairly certain I don't have the math skills to be a physicist.
>
> Chris
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Social Networks Discussion Forum on behalf of Ajay Mehra
> Sent: Thu 2/10/2005 5:22 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Cc:
> Subject: Re: Physics and Sociology
>
>
>
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>
> I think Professor Scott may be overstating the case. Both Watts and Barabasi
> have acknowledged the "debt" they owe to earlier work on networks, including
> the work done by sociologists. That they may have done so somewhat belatedly
> is a different matter.
>
> All this agonizing over who came up first with what, of course, is nothing
> new in the sciences. I am persuaded by Whitehead's observation: "But to come
> very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two
> very different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of
> importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it."
> Sociologists may have been aware of scale-free distributions, but it was the
> (recent crop of) physicists who saw the relevance of these distributions for
> understanding phenomena such as the WWW, and who have turned the study of
> these distributions into a fruitful research program.
>
> Ajay Mehra
> University of Cincinnati
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Social Networks Discussion Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Bienenstock Elisa
> Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2005 4:28 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Physics and Sociology
>
> ***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org *****
>
> Well said. Thank you.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Social Networks Discussion Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Scott, John
> Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2005 6:24 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Physics and Sociology
>
> ***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org *****
>
> In all the recent discussions about the relationship between physics and
> sociology in the study of social networks, the fundamental issue seems
> to have been lost sight of. The important issue is not whether the two
> disciplines can or should cooperate. That is essential and it happens
> frequently. Contributors to the discussion have pointed out many
> fruitful and important cases, and the history of sociology is full of
> many others. The big problem arises when academics from one discipline
> move into the area of another discipline without trying to discover what
> work has already been done by its practitioners. At best they reinvent
> the wheel. At worst they antagonise people with their intellectual
> arrogance.
>
>
>
> This is what has happened with much of the recent work on small worlds:
> physicists have argued that their methods and theories can illuminate
> social networks but have failed to realise that a whole community of
> sociological network researchers already exists and has done exactly the
> kind of work that they are pointing to. Their books claim to have made
> startling discoveries about the social world and advocate the
> development of new research programmes on these topics. Their reviewers
> take these claims at face value and so a reputation for intellectual
> novelty is built up.
>
>
>
> It is surely a basic failure of normal scholarly research procedures
> that these books can be written and published without the author
> undertaking any proper literature search. The author of one recent book
> expounding the novelty of the 'power law' does not seem to realise that
> sociological work over many years has documented the existence of this
> kind of distribution in many real social networks. None of this is
> cited. Its author does not seem to have discovered the existence of
> journals on social networks, nor does he seem to realise that INSNA
> exists and that the cover design of its newsletter shows a network with
> a power law structure. This same book is based around the author's
> research into internet search engines, but it doesn't seem as if he has
> ever typed the words 'social networks' into Google or any other search
> engine.
>
>
>
> If I were to come up with the idea that familiar theories from sociology
> could illuminate problems in physics, the first thing I would do would
> be a literature search to see if anybody, in physics or elsewhere, had
> already worked on the issue. Physicists who followed the same strategy
> when they wished to contribute something to social analysis, might find
> that they would be welcomed more warmly by their social science
> colleagues.
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
> Professor John Scott
> Department of Sociology,
> University of Essex
> Colchester CO4 3SQ
>
> Telephone: 01206-872640
> Web site: <http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~scottj>
>
>
>
>
>
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