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***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org ***** Dear Ryan, Do you really believe (like most STS scholars) that contexts are so important? For example, can you discover from this message whether it was written on a laptop or a desktop, on a PC or a Macintosh? If you would not know, could you recognize my age or gender from it? No: this is STS rubbish. (It enables them to legitimate the writing of thick histories.) Contexts matter only if they are structural. For example, university-industry relations may matter in pharmaceutical research or in the food industry. But it would not matter in itself whether I had a brother who was running a company. The crucial question is whether variation is significant. If it is, we may be able to hypothesize structural factors. With best wishes, Loet ________________________________ Loet Leydesdorff Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR) Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-20- 525 3681 [log in to unmask] ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/ _____________________________________________________________________ SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social network researchers (http://www.insna.org). To unsubscribe, send an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message.