Networks in Politics, Business and Social Life

Annotation

Although much of what is currently produced in social sciences continues to focus on individual entities (institutions, organizations, groups of individuals, policies and policy domains, territorial levels of complexity such as municipalities, regions, nation states and supranational aggregations of actors) without much regard for adjacent ones, the really interesting questions are increasingly of a relational nature. Network has become the most general term for describing and analyzing such relations.

This course shall start by turning to classical contributions to network thinking as supplied by anthropology, sociology, biology, history, theories of complexity, evolutionary approaches and systems theory. We shall read and discuss these contributions and then, in a second step, turn to political science and policy analysis in order to check ways of applying the network concept in empirical research. Therefore, the course will also provide partial insights into forms of applied, i.e. empirical network analysis - including ways of representing social and political configurations in graphical form. The idea is to organize at least two sessions in the faculty's computer laboratory.

Participants should have an interest in one or more of the topics mentioned and should, in particular, be prepared to contribute actively to discussions and to develop questions and provide answers in a more or less autonomous fashion.