Douglas White Home Page #2

Douglas White, home page (GUIDE) return

... social science professor at the University of California Irvine. This site and the diverse pages linked to it gives some of my work and quite of few of the resources (many open for student research, including potential fieldwork sites with electronic databases) that I've put together on networks, scientific visualization, longitudinal fieldsite and network ethnography, and cross-cultural comparisons.

Questions posed (and tools developed) in my work include: How are societies constituted as networks and, through cultural kinetics, as self-organizing systems? How is the sexual division of labor organized? (tool: entailment analysis as a means of studying rule systems and relations among relations) Social roles? (tool: regular equivalence for studying roles) How do social groups emerge? (tool: cohesion analysis) How is institutional form emergent out of process? (combining: rule, role, activity and material flows interlock through network and P-graph analyses). How does the interlock of societies in regional systems affect institutional forms, such as systems of marriage? (tool: autocorrelation). How do the vicissitudes of the larger world systems -- trade and conflict -- affect local level societies? How are world systems organized as networks and how do they change over time?

In view of the limitations of ahistorical structural and comparative approaches, I turned to longitudinal field and social historical studies for refining structural-dynamic and coalitional theories and developing P-system analysis of the links between micro and large-scale population phenomena. Current studies -- Mexico, Austria and elsewhere -- examine issues in social organization and development: sustainability, institutional structure, cognition, and choice. How are resilience and change in society mediated through time by small and large group dynamics, interlock and individual agency?

My work, and Vita

1998 Kinship, Networks and Exchange Eds. Thomas Schweizer, drw. Cambridge University Press

1997 Class, Property and Structural Endogamy: Visualizing Networked Histories (Lilyan Brudner & drw). Theory and Society 25:161-208.

1997 Structural Endogamy

1996 Kinship Networks and Discrete Structure Theory: Applications and Implications (drw & Paul Jorion). Social Networks 18:267-314.

1992 Structure and Dynamics of the Global Economy: Network Analysis of International Trade 1965-1980 (Dave Smith & drw) Social Forces 70:857-894

1989 Research Methods in Social Network Analysis Eds. L.C.Freeman, drw, A.K. Romney. Transaction Press

Structural Analysis/Cultural Kinetics

My coordinates
and background [My Picture]

Photo by Lilyan Brudner, NYC-1998

Resources

Seminars

Undergraduate Classes

Projects and Student Opportunities for Research

Download P-Graphs

Download 3-D Pajek drawings with Chime

eclectic test - 3-D Pajek drawings with Chime

Download Entailment Analysis

Programs on-line

Software written

Social Networks web sites

Center for Evolutionary Physics

Anthropology web sites

Networks in Society and History journal

Discussion Forum home pages

1985-90, founded and edited World Cultures electronic journal

Grounded in the modeling of process, use of these resources allows the combination of insights from structuralism, mathematical social science, complexity theory, small world analysis, and conceptualizing networks and their graph theoretic properties. My work is coextensive with an interest in the foundations of social networks research, using concepts of networked processes to formulate general theory in sociology and anthropology that comprehends emergent structure, and self-organizing systems. Part of my goal in developing tools of network analysis (e.g., regular equivalence blockmodeling and statistical entailment analysis) has been to model large-scale network ethnographies and social systems, including models of the structural dynamics of the world economy and its local or regional impacts. A current collaborative project (you need to install Acrobat Reader 3.0 to view the proposal), on the network construction of social institutions and social class, involves researchers from centers of social networks studies worldwide.