Amy's comments

Monge and Contractor

In these two chapters, Monge and Contractor further their exploration into the social mechanisms that influence why people (or peoples) create, reshape, drop, (etc.) links within their organizational networks. Throughout the book, the authors have done a fabulous job in outlining various types of theories we may use to answer this question… theories of self interest, collective action, exchange, homophily, co-evolution and others. However, I still can’t help feeling cheated. I get the fact that multiple actors/influences are at play at any given time and that looking at only one aspect of the environment leads to an incomplete representation. People change along with others in their network. One person’s actions/decisions, etc. alter the environment as a whole. At the same time other people’s changes alter the network that we are in turn responding to. This isn’t simply telling us to conduct our analysis at multiple levels is it? I know that already. It’s the same battle we wage with quantitative versus qualitative analysis… both have advantages and disadvantages (which is why I like mixed methodologies so much). You can’t argue with the authors’ claim that it’s better or more complete to conduct research at multiple levels of analysis. Of course it is. But HOW DO WE DO IT? I feel like I got invited to the ball, but when I got there realized that no one else had shown up. It was a big letdown.

Fritjof Capra: The Web of Life

This book provides a nice complement to what we’ve been reading so far. Capra looks at the ecology of living systems. It’s reassuring to see that what we have come to accept in the hard sciences, like physics, is also reinforced in what we “soft science” people have been talking about for so long. He reinforces the existence of interrelationships among systems of living things. The world is a web of relationships—the social, chemical, psychological, cultural, etc. aspects of our lives are all interconnected with those same aspects of everyone else’s life. I still wonder: What is the perception of this in the scientific community?