My current work on social networks, social action/organization, and complex adaptive systems operates across various debates among paradigms in social science. At one end of the debate, methodological individualism frames policy agendas in economics and political science by sole emphasis on individual agency, as if there is no society, no history (but with interesting bottom-up agent-based simulations). At the end, the structuralist view of social facts goes too far in the opposite direction, and is overly aggregative. The structural-Durkheimian view ignores the dynamics of relations, asserting the efficacy of societal forms through the vehicle of norms as if norms were static functions of social groups.

The approach to social science I call cultural kinetics offers a more dynamic view of co-emergence of structure and process. It begins with the materiality of relations, and explores varieties of networks and networks of networks, focuses on concrete relations among individuals and groups. Emphasizing dynamic processes, structure is abstracted only after analysis. This approach incorporates insights from sociology, anthropology and formal models so as to accomodate the effects of emergent structure out of multiple agent and multiple relations.