Tag Archives: Sunbelt 2013

Call for Papers: Session on “Mechanisms of Change in Organizational Networks” XXXIII. Sunbelt Conference, May 21 – 26, 2013 in Hamburg, Germany

Call for Papers
Session on “Mechanisms of Change in Organizational Networks” XXXIII. Sunbelt Conference, May 21 – 26, 2013 in Hamburg, Germany

Session organizers:
Henning Hillmann, University of Mannheim, Germany (hillmann@uni-mannheim.de)
Valery Yakubovich, ESSEC Business School, France (yakubovich@essec.fr)

One of the most exciting areas in recent studies of organizational networks concerns the emergence of new organizational forms (e.g. the volume on Emergence of Organizations and Markets, by John Padgett and Woody Powell): where do markets and organizations come from? What social structural conditions and contexts are particularly favorable to facilitate innovation in organizations and elsewhere? Social science research tends to be attracted to newness. Yet, just as important are questions about the persistence of established organizational networks: why exactly are some organizational networks more likely to survive than others? What social mechanisms may account for their long-run survival and the spill-over effects they may have into other areas of organizational life? At the same time, we routinely observe organizational change. Does such change emerge endogenously, from within organizational networks? Or, is it more likely to be triggered by exogenous shocks? We believe that a promising approach to answering these questions seeks to identify the micro-foundations and causal mechanisms that give rise to various organizational macro-structures (e.g. Peter Hedstrom and Peter Bearman, eds., Handbook of Analytical Sociology).

We invite submissions that advance our understanding of the emergence, persistence and change of organizational networks. We particularly welcome contributions that try to solve interesting empirical puzzles and advance theory through mechanism-based explanations.

Submission will be closing on December 31 at 11:59:59 EST. Please limit your abstract to 250 words.
Proceed to abstract submission: http://www.abstractserver.com/sunbelt2013/absmgm/

When submitting your abstract, please select “Mechanisms of Change in Organizational Networks” as session title in the drop down box on the submission site. To be extra sure please put a note in the “additional notes” box on the abstract submission form that states Henning Hillmann as the session organizer.

For further information on the venue an1d conference registration see http://hamburg-sunbelt2013.org

Call for Abstracts for the Session “Transnational Networks” at the XXXIII. Sunbelt Conference, May 21 – 26, 2013 in Hamburg, Germany

Transnational networks – Call for Abstracts for a session at the XXXIII. Sunbelt Conference, May 21 – 26, 2013 in Hamburg, Germany

organized by Andreas Herz, Sören Petermann and José Luis Molina

Transnational studies focus on the border-crossing activities of individuals, migrant groups, corporations and social movements. A central innovation of the concept “transnationalism” depends on a perspective which refers to cross-border relationships and networks. E.g. looking at personal networks it can be seen that more and more people have highly transnationally dispersed relationship structures wherein the “social” is only partly routed in the “local”. Especially relational approaches and social network analysis (SNA) allow reconsidering and researching the cross-cutting transfer of ideas, transnational support as well as the formation of opinions and lifestyles beyond different geographical spaces and nation states. We invite presentations to discuss the transnational and geographically dispersed social formations form a network perspective. Possible questions are:

  • What role do cross-border social networks play to migration, mobility, science and entrepreneurship?
  • What is the structure of cross-border formations? What role does transnationality play for the provision of different resources?
  • Which network approaches can be addressed in observing transnational distribution of networks? What measures have potential to express structure of transnationality?
  • How can network analysis help to understand the interrelationship between social space and transnational and/ or geographical space? What is the relation between distance and transnationality?

Submission will be closing on December 31 at 11:59:59 EST. Please limit your abstract to 250 words. Proceed to abstract submission: http://www.abstractserver.com/sunbelt2013/absmgm/

When submitting your abstract, please select “Transnational networks” as session title in the drop down box on the submission site. To be extra sure please put a note in the “additional notes” box on the abstract submission form that states Andreas Herz, Sören Petermann and José Luis Molina as the session organizers.

Best,
Andreas Herz, University of Hildesheim Foundation
Sören Petermann, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity

José Luis Molina, University Autònoma de Barcelona

Session on “Family Networks” at the XXXIII. Sunbelt 2013 – Hamburg

Call for Papers for a session on “Family Networks”
at the XXXIII. Sunbelt Conference, May 21 – 26, 2013 in Hamburg, Germany

Session organizers:

Andreas Klärner, University of Rostock, Germany, andreas.klaerner@uni-rostock.de
Sylvia Keim, University of Rostock, Germany, sylvia.keim@uni-rostock.de

Reaching back to Elizabeth Bott’s classic study on family relations and the division of labor within a couple, social network analysis has been an interesting perspective for family researchers. Since the discussion about “postmodern” or “patchwork”-families the traditional concept of family has been challenged and no longer can be conceived as given or unproblematic. Here the perspective of dynamically changing networks of family relations has become more and more prominent. Drawing on this discussion, we would like to ask how a network perspective can enhance our understanding of different processes in the making of families. Therefore, in this session we want to bring together researchers interested in family relations and social network analysis. We invite abstracts on theoretical as well as empirical work and appreciate different methodological approaches ranging from quantitative to qualitative and mixed-methods research methods.

Possible topics may include:

  • Family construction or the concept of family: How can a network perspective of dynamically changing family relations contribute to the discussion on changing and varying family patterns?
  • Union and family formation: How do personal relations and social support networks affect transitions to different stages in union and family formation? Do social networks have an effect on the transition to parenthood?
  • Family networks across the life course: How do family (and other) relations change across the life course? A special focus can be on specific life events as partnership formation, (re-)marriage, parenthood, separation/divorce, widowhood, children leaving home…
  • The effects of family ties in various research fields: What is the role of family ties and family support networks for e.g. individual health, education trajectories, (recovery from) drug addiction, criminal trajectories?
  • Intergenerational exchanges: What forms of social capital do intergenerational ties provide? Which financial transfers take place? How are they embedded in rules of reciprocity or solidarity? How are support for children and care of the elderly in “patchwork”-families organized?

Sunbelt Submission will be closing on December 31 at 11:59:59 EST. In order to organize the session, we will need the abstract a bit earlier, by December 20, 2012. Please limit your abstract to 250 words. The oral presentation is scheduled for 20 minutes. Please contact us, if you have any questions. For further information on the conference see http://hamburg-sunbelt2013.org

Contact: Andreas Klärner, Institut für Soziologie und Demographie, Universität Rostock, Ulmenstr. 69, D-18057 Rostock, Tel. +(0)381 498-4367, E-Mail

Call for Abstracts to a Special Note Section: “The German-Language Tradition: Approaches to Social Networks”

Sunbelt 2013, Hamburg

Call for Abstracts to a Special Note Section: “The German-Language Tradition: Approaches to Social Networks”

Session of the Section “Sociological Network Research” in the German Sociological Association (GSA)

The current techniques, methods, and theories that make up the body of Social Network Analysis hark back to developments that emanated to a large extent from North America. Its roots, however, can be found to a large part in the German-language tradition of sociology. Georg Simmel is the most prominent figure in this respect. By questioning the status of the individual as the unit of analysis and conceiving sociology as the study of relationships and their diverse forms, Simmel adumbrated many of the cornerstones of today’s network research.

But Simmel was not the only one who imagined a way of doing sociology that starts from relations and networks (or forms) of relations. One of the first who thought in relational categories was Karl Marx. Much later Leopold von Wiese erected his whole system of general sociology on the notions of relation and process. Karl Mannheim’s studies on the sociology of knowledge discussed the impact of social structure on forms of thinking and knowing. Theodor Litt and Alfred Schütz made fundamental contributions to relational lines of thought with their ideas on the reciprocity of perspectives. Helmuth Plessner, Norbert Elias and of course Niklas Luhmann should be added. Their ideas on relational boundaries, configurations, and patterns of related expectations are certainly part of the German-language tradition of relational sociology.

In addition to these theoretical approaches one should take into account that this tradition also comprises scholars who emigrated to the US, such as Jakob Moreno and Paul Lazarsfeld. Both of them are well-known for their substantial empirical developments. Digging a little bit deeper yet reveals that the empirical roots even date back to the 19th century. For example, in a recently rediscovered article from 1900 matrix algebra is used to trace a German schoolboy’s friends network.

All these works (many others could be added) are very instructive when viewed in the light of modern network research. They broaden the foundations for any current or forthcoming approaches that aim at a theory of social networks and the development of consequent methods. This might trigger a reconsideration of nagging questions and open issues concerning the role of meaning and stories in networks, the multiplexity of ties, the dynamics of networks, the formation of identities, and the setting, crossing, or erasing of boundaries.

In this special note section we would like to concentrate these diverse and dispersed works of the German-language tradition by using networks as a common focus. Many of the named scholars and theories have been discussed extensively in different fields. But they have never been pooled or combined under the rubric of network research so far.

Therefore we invite abstracts for 20 minute oral presentations that address scholars of this tradition and that work out how the pertinent theoretical ideas and notions reset, shift, or reframe critical issues of network research. The discussion of the contributions should revolve around possible combinations and benefits for network theory and analysis.

Submission will be closing on December 31. Abstracts up to a maximum of 250 words should be submitted to the Sunbelt abstract server: http://www.abstractserver.com/sunbelt2013/absmgm/

When submitting your abstract, please select “German-Language Tradition” as session title in the drop down box on the submission site.

Session Organizers:
Christian Stegbauer, Goethe University Frankfurt
Roger Häußling, RWTH Aachen University
Athanasios Karafillidis, RWTH Aachen University (all Germany)

Sunbelt XXXIII: Call for Papers – Session SNA-QCA

Call for Papers for a session on “SNA meets QCA”

at the XXXIII. Sunbelt Conference, May 21 – 26, 2013 in Hamburg, Germany

Session organizers:
Anja Iseke, University of Paderborn, Germany
Jörg Raab, Tilburg University, the Netherlands

Like social network analysis (SNA), qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) has gained popularity as a research strategy and a family of methods since Charles Ragin (1989, 2000, 2008) introduced QCA to the social sciences. Following a set-theoretic approach, QCA views cases as configurations of outcomes and conditions based on Boolean algebra. In contrast to studying net effects of independent variables as in regression analysis, QCA methods seek to identify necessary and/or sufficient combinations of conditions that lead to an outcome. QCA is well atuned to multiple conjunctural causation, which implies that first, a combination of conditions (rather than a single condition) produces an outcome (conjunctural causation), second, there may be more than one combination of conditions which account for an outcome (equifinality), and third, a (combination) of condition leading to the presence of an outcome might be quite different from a combinations of conditions leading to the absence of the outcome (causal asymmetry).

So far, only few studies have combined SNA and QCA. For example, social networks have been studied as a condition (e.g., Stevenson & Greenberg, 2000) or as an outcome (Magetti, 2009). QCA has also been used to create typologies of networks (e.g., Yamasaki & Spreitzer, 2006) and Raab, Provan and Lemaire (forthcoming) discuss the combination for inter-organizational networks. Those studies provide ample evidence that QCA is a powerful approach for studying social networks. Configurational network theories may deepen our understanding of social networks antecedents, processes and outcomes, and QCA provide the methodological tools to test these theories. In addition, QCA is very suitable in combining qualitative and quantitative data to explain outcomes on the node, dyad or network level of analysis.

We invite abstracts for 20 minute oral presentations on social network studies that follow a configurational approach and/or apply set-theoretic methods, such as crisp-set QCA, multi-value QCA , fuzzy-set QCA from all social science disciplines.

Some of the questions to address include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Which combinations of conditions lead to specific outcomes? (e.g., what are necessary and sufficient conditions for occupying a central position in a network, what network characteristics are necessary and sufficient for high or low network effectiveness?)
  • Are certain network attributes (alone or in combination with other conditions) sufficient to explain a specific outcome (e.g., under which conditions are weak ties sufficient for receiving advice?)
  • Do actors occupying different network positions require different conditions to achieve a certain outcome? (e.g., do central or peripheral actors require different strategies or resources to perform well?
  • …

Submission will be closing on December 31 at 11:59:59 EST. Please limit your abstract to 250 words.

Proceed to abstract submission: http://www.abstractserver.com/sunbelt2013/absmgm/

When submitting your abstract, please select “SNA meets QCA” as session title in the drop down box on the submission site. To be extra sure please put a note in the “additional notes” box on the abstract submission form that states Anja Iseke as the session organizer.

For further information on the venue and conference registration see http://hamburg-sunbelt2013.org

References
Fischer, M. 2011. Social Network Analysis and Qualitative Comparative Analysis: Their Mutual Benefit for the Explanation of Policy Network Structures. Methodological Innovations Online, 6(2): 27–51.

Maggetti, M. 2009. The role of independent regulatory agencies in policy-making: a comparative analysis. Journal of European Public Policy, 16(3): 450–470.

Raab, J., Provan, K. and Lemaire, R. The Configurational Approach in Organizational Networks Research, in:”Configurational Theory and Methods in Organizational Research”, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, edited by P. Fiss, A. Marx and B. Cambre, forthcoming.

Ragin, C. C. 1989. The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (1st ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ragin, C. C. 2000. Fuzzy-Set Social Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ragin, C. C. 2008. Redesigning social inquiry: Fuzzy sets and beyond. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stevenson, W. B., & Greenberg, D. 2000. Agency and Social Networks: Strategies of Action in a Social Structure of Position, Opposition, and Opportunity. Administrative Science Quarterly, 45(4): 651–678.

Yamasaki, S., & Spreitzer, A. 2006. Beyond Methodological Tenets. In H. Grimm & B. Rihoux (Eds.), Innovative Comparative Methods for Policy Analysis: 95–120. New York: Springer.

XXXIII. Sunbelt Social Networks Conference of INSNA, May 21 – 26, 2013 in Hamburg, Germany

XXXIII. Sunbelt Social Networks Conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA), May 21 – 26, 2013 in Hamburg, Germany

Call for Abstracts

Deadline: December 31, 2012

The Sunbelt XXXIII. program committee is soliciting abstracts for paper and poster presentations at the upcoming 2013 conference in Hamburg, Germany.

Submission closes on December 31 at 11:59:59 EST. We invite abstract submissions for posters (120 minute poster session) and paper presentations (20 minute talk) on topics relevant to social network analysis, including theory, methods, and applications of social network analysis. Please limit your abstracts to 250 words. If a series of papers are being submitted as a single panel or session, please indicate this in the “special note section” of the abstract submission website (see FAQ’s). Paper and poster presentations will begin on Wed May 22 and conclude on Sun May 26. Presenting authors of accepted submissions must be members of INSNA and must register for and present their work at the meeting. This stipulation applies to both oral and poster presentations. Each member may present only one paper at the conference.

Abstract submissions are due by 31 December 2012. No abstracts can be accepted after this date.

If you want to submit an abstract, you will be asked to provide the following information (for further information see FAQ’s):

  • Name/s of author/s with affiliation and email
  • Title of the presentation
  • Abstract (limit: 250 words)
  • select “(oral) paper presentation”, “poster presentation” or “no preference”
  • select a session title (list provided)
  • select up to five key words (list provided)

Proceed to Abstract submission:
http://www.abstractserver.com/sunbelt2013/absmgm/

Find out more about the venue and conference registration http://hamburg-sunbelt2013.org/

Proceed to more information about INSNA and Sunbelt Conferences http://www.insna.org/sunbelt.html

Email address for local organizers of the Sunbelt 2013 conference is: sunbelt2013@uni-hamburg.de

See you in Hamburg, the organizing committee:

Betina Hollstein
Sonja Drobnic
Michael Schnegg

Sunbelt XXXIII: Call for Workshop Proposals (Deadline: October 31, 2012)

The Sunbelt XXXIII program committee is soliciting workshop proposals for the upcoming 2013 conference in Hamburg, Germany. Workshops precede the conference and are typically one half-day to one full-day in length. They feature a participant-centered and highly interactive approach. Workshops cover topics and skills that are important to researchers who use social network analysis and provide substantive training and opportunities for practice and critical discussion. Workshops will take place May 21–22, 2013.

Workshop submissions are due by 31 October 2012. No proposals can be accepted after this date.

Proceed to Workshop Proposals submission

Save the date: Sunbelt 2013 in Hamburg 21.-26.Mai 2013

Der deutschsprachigen Netzwerkforscher/innengemeinde ist es gelungen, die Jahreskonferenz des “International Network of Social Network Analysis” (INSNA), die sog. Sunbelt-Konferenz, das erste Mal seit 32 Jahren nach Deutschland zu holen!

Bitte notiert Euch schon einmal den Termin:
Die Sunbelt 2013 findet 21.-26. Mai 2013 (in der Woche nach Pfingsten) in Hamburg statt.

Die Tagung wird im Hauptgebäude der Universität Hamburg, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, stattfinden. Das 100 Jahre alte, frisch renovierte Art-deco-Gebäude befindet sich im Herzen der Stadt, ca. 100 Meter vom ICE-Bahnhof Hamburg-Dammtor entfernt.

Der Call for Abstract wird im Oktober verschickt werden. Vorraus. Bewerbungsschluss wird im Dezember sein.

Übernachtungsmöglichkeiten in der fußläufiger Entfernung zum Veranstaltungsort werden in unterschiedlichen Preiskategorien – ähnlich wie bei der letzten europäischen Tagung in Riva del Garda in 2010 – zentral gebucht werden können.

Please note für diejenigen Nachwuchswissenschaftler/innen, die das Budget nicht überstrapazieren wollen: Als günstige und wunderschön direkt am Hamburger Hafen gelegene Übernachtungsmöglichkeit empfehlen wir das Jugendhotel „Auf dem Stintfang”, Alfred-Wegener-Weg 5, 20459 Hamburg. Da es sich um eine Jugendherberge handelt, muss dieses individuell gebucht werden: http://www.djh-nordmark.de/index.php?id=431