If Parsons had Pajek: The Relevance of Midcentury Structural-Functionalism to Dynamic Network Analysis*

Social network analysis has been one of the most influential scientific revolutions of the past century. Its success has been due, in part, to its methodological sophistication and the emphasis it places on identifying and clearly depicting features of social structure. As such, social network analysis is often viewed in stark contrast to the structuralist paradigm that dominated the social sciences prior to its rise – structural-functionalism – in the mid-20th century. In this paper, we highlight important connections that exist between the key assumptions of social network analysis and the key tenets of some of the most influential structural-functional theories – especially those of Robert K. Merton and Talcott Parsons and their collaborators and followers. We reveal a substantial affinity between some of their most influential ideas and contemporary analysis of social network dynamics, in particular, and several ways in which their work could inform promising advances in this line of research. Our ultimate goal is to highlight the prospect of using these theories to guide future analyses of the dynamics of large social systems and the sequences of real-time action that compose them. a Corresponding author: Department of Sociology, Cornell University, 342 Uris Hall Ithaca, NY 14853, btc49@cornell.edu. We thank Maoz Brown, Claude Fischer, Joseph Galaskiewicz, Mark Granovetter, James Iveniuk, Markus Schafer, Alan Sica, Richard Swedberg, Erin York Cornwell, an anonymous reviewer, and John Skvoretz for reading early drafts and providing insightful comments that improved this paper b Department of Sociology,University of Chicago, 1126 E. 59th Street, Room 410, Chicago, IL 60637, e-laumann@uchicago.edu. Structural-functionalism and social network analysis are two of the predominant paradigms of the social sciences within the past 75 years. However, following an almost complete paradigm shift in structural sociology, they are generally seen as unconnected. Especially, as expressed in the writings of its most famous architects, Robert K. Merton and Talcott Parsons, structuralfunctionalism is highly abstract and overly generalized. Discrete data on individuals and events were rarely used in structural-functional work, and statements about social structure and processes were almost entirely conjectural. Social network analysis, on the other hand, is concrete and empirical. It hinges on the identification and systematic examination of actual actors and the relationships that exist between them. The two approaches to understanding society were developed by different sets of scholars, were developed in different eras, and established entirely different vocabularies to describe the way society works. In these respects, the two paradigms seem, and are generally regarded, to be wholly incompatible. Structural-functionalism was widely criticized and had fallen out of favor by the 1970s. It was around this time that social network analysis began to emerge as a unified structural paradigm. This approach grew partly out of social-anthropological and social-psychological efforts to trace the micro-connections that exist between individual actors in small groups – a practice that was known as sociometry (e.g., Mitchell 1969; Moreno 1934). These methods were soon expanded to include analyses of relationships in larger groups, which involved the organization of data in matrices that could be interrogated mathematically (with the aid of computers) to uncover patterns of relationships. This included formal techniques for studying small groups, such as blockmodeling, as well as graph-theoretic analyses of larger populations (Freeman 2004). Social network analysts, thus, came to underscore the differences between their approach and that of midcentury structural-functionalists (see Granovetter 1990, as discussed below). The explosion of empirical network analysis that followed – with its new vocabulary of precise mathematical terms and its immensely useful visual aids – has, in retrospect, made the tenets of structuralfunctionalism look ungrounded and lifeless. The main argument of this paper is that, despite apparent differences between structuralfunctionalism and social network analysis, there are also numerous and instructive affinities between these two paradigms, especially when considering Merton’s middle-range theories and Parsons’ systems-level structural accounts. The first, preliminary, goal of this paper is to highlight some of these affinities (as outlined in the following section). Both of these paradigms emphasize the omnipresence of a social structure that conditions individual agency. Further, both approaches assume that social structure has consequences for actors. While midcentury structural-functionalist scholarship tends to take this structure for granted, social network analysis actively attempts to detect and describe it systematically (Wellman 1983). Both paradigms share similar concerns, and, therefore, ask similar questions about the nature of social structure and agency, with a particular focus on describing those regular connections that are capable of supporting system-level processes, such as diffusion. In addition, both paradigms share an emphasis on the inherently relational nature of society (see the brief discussion of Parsons in Emirbayer 1997). In general, both spend considerable time addressing: 1) connections that exist among social actors and the larger structures or systems that emerge from these connections; 2) the importance of social roles 1 Parsons speaks of the “level of analysis” problem, where there is an emergent structure at an inclusive level that cannot be readily deduced by microlevel processes. More familiarly, Coleman (1990) referred to this as the macro-