Douglas R. White

University of California, Irvine | UCI · School of Social Sciences

One of the universal features of human sociality is the fact that our social networks are highly integrated – human societies exhibit several nested social layers including families, bands and communities. Several factors have been identified as creating disincentives for hostile intergroup relations, including economic interdependence (trade), int...

This chapter presents studies in various world regions. Each uses network analysis software designed explicitly for kinship studies with explicit network measures of cohesion. It presents evidence of fundamental differences in the forms of marital cohesion that show profoundly different effects over a wide range of social phenomena, regional scales...

For l’Homme, Special issue on kinship Regardless of how marriage is locally defined, most people in most places marry (and/or have children with) people who are neither too close (immediate family members) nor overly distant (total strangers). As a result, many members of a given community are linked to each other by multiple direct or indirect tie...

This Chapter argues for connecting models of several kinds of macro- and micro-processes as they affect structure and dynamics in the globalization ofnetworksoftrade.Thepurposeistoexploremultiplelevelsofstructure, process, and adaptation and to loosen assumptions about determinacy in models of networks and globalization. As do many models of emerge...

The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample is a sample of 186 cultures used by scholars engaged in cross-cultural studies. The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample database contains nearly 2000 coded variables describing culture, economy, political and social organization and many other aspects of those cultures.

The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample is a sample of 186 cultures used by scholars engaged in cross-cultural studies. The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample database contains nearly 2000 coded variables describing culture, economy, political and social organization and many other aspects of those cultures.

Extending the innovative “Def Wy” procedures for modeling evolutionary network effects (Dow, Cross-Cult Res 41:336–363, 2007; Dow and Eff, Cross-Cult Res 43:134–151, 2009; Dow and Eff, Cross-Cult Res 43:206–229, 2009), a Complex Social Science http:// intersci. ss. uci. edu (CoSSci) Gateway was developed to provide complex analyses of ethnographic,...

Structurally cohesive subgroups are a powerful and mathematically rigorous way to characterize network robustness. Their strength lies in the ability to detect strong connections among vertices that not only have no neighbors in common, but that may be distantly separated in the graph. Unfortunately, identifying cohesive subgroups is a computationa...

We show the fallacies of the Zipfian and power-law views in quantitative analyses of city-size distributions and of the notion that they are superior, simpler, and more universal than q-exponential or Pareto II distributions because of the single-parameter assumption. Both sets of models have two parameters, but the q-exponential captures a scaling...

We show the fallacies of the Zipfian and power-law views in quantitative analyses of city-size distributions and of the notion that they are superior, sim-pler, and more universal than q-exponential or Pareto II distributions because of the single-parameter assumption. Both sets of models have two parameters, but the q-exponential captures a scalin...

Three theories new to cognitive anthropology are proposed and either tested or supported with empirical evidence. First, predictive cohesion theory suggests the cohesion-consensus hypothesis of cultural sharing. Structural cohesion is a formal network measure that identifies the group boundaries for which the redundancy or multiconnectivity of ties...

Under certain conditions, when diverse individuals (e.g., ants, individuals, agents) independently traverse a sequential decision space in reaching objectives, they acquire synergetic properties of global problem solving by virtue of pooling experience. The laying of pheromones on random paths taken by ants, for example, has been shown to identify...

Kinship, like language, is a structure, not a substance. The distinctive features of kinship networks reside less in how their constitutive ties - be they biological, jural, ritual, symbolic, or whatever - are defined and established than in the way these ties are organized. Kinship network theory is thus not just another "application" of general n...

Cultural theory and Mathematical anthropology are greatly advanced by careful ethnographic description (e.g., Trautmann 1981), mathematical modeling (e.g., Tjon Sie Fat 1998) and conceptual simplification, of which the Barbosa de Almeida article is an excellent example. Trautmann (1981) did a great service in coding the variety of Dravidian kin-ter...

The feature of Dravidian kinship terminology is typically that male lines on ego’s “side” marry and call their “affines” relatives in a set of opposing male lines. The egocentric versus sociocentric debate in Anthropology over the social network implications of Dravidian terminology is resolved with proof of a single theorem: For a connected networ...

We examine the emergent field of economic networks and explore its ability to shed light on the global and volatile economy where credit, ownership, innovation, investment, and virtually every other economic activity is carried at a scale and scope that respects no geographical, organizational, or political boundaries. In this context, the study of...

The current economic crisis illustrates a critical need for new and fundamental understanding of the structure and dynamics of economic networks. Economic systems are increasingly built on interdependencies, implemented through trans-national credit and investment networks, trade relations, or supply chains that have proven difficult to predict and...

of interactions with scores of SFI researchers, visitors, and staff. Special thanks to Jeroen Bruggeman for sharing his prepublication book manuscript and the cross-fertilization of ideas presented in section IV, to Henry Wright for detailed commentary and suggestions, Eric Smith for comments on the coalescence of the argument, Peter Turchin for sh...

The ability to specify models of social processes in relatively precise terms proves to be central to historical dynamics and to a macro-approach to innovation and social change as well as to micro-approaches. This chapter views innovation and social change as occurring in social networks. It is less concerned with how, or precisely what innovation...

After the 1990s, original equipment manufacturers (OEM) as multinational conglomerates have become more powerful than ever, exerting control over their suppliers, owing in part to the advanced machining and information technologies. Is this a revival of the traditional Marxian framework, or a "dual economy"? Conducting network analysis of supplier-...

Introduction The analysis of the structural and statistical properties of complex networks is one of the major foci of complex systems science at the moment. In the context of social networks, the idea that the pattern of connectivity is related to the function of an agent in the network is known as playing a "role" or assuming a "position". Comple...

Ethnographies of Indigenous Australian language groups suggest that their populations were consistently small, averaging perhaps 500 people each, while classical models of their kinship systems consistently embody endogamous marriage as both a norm and a logical requirement. However, paleodemographers argue that reproductively closed small human po...

proof corrections; variables not italicized) Globalization, world-system, and historical dynamic theory offer complemen-tary perspectives for the study of city systems as the politico-economic engine of interstate networks. Here we combine these perspectives to examine a dy-namical perspective on systems of cities. Globalization theory applied to E...

The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample contains the best-described society in each of 186 cultural provinces of the world, chosen so that cultural independence of each unit in terms of historical origin and cultural diffusion could be considered maximal with respect to the others societies in the sample. Often the time period chosen is that of the earl...

Given data on supplier chains in a Tokyo industrial district, we show how network structures such as monopsony (uniqueness of buyers) may affect noncompetitive pricing. To address the distribution of these biases we show how two types of emergent roles in hierarchically organized production chains affect noncompetitive price diffusion both horizont...

We present a framework for automatically decomposing ("block-modeling") the functional classes of agents within a complex network. These classes are represented by the nodes of an image graph ("block model") depicting the main patterns of connectivity and thus functional roles in the network. Using a first principles approach, we derive a measure f...

Given that a power-law growth dynamic giving way as predicted by von Foerster et al. (1960) to a global demographic transition has been occurring since 1962, we examine the long-term time-series of conventional estimations of world population to see if one or more similar transitions occurred in the past. There is no scientific justification to rej...

This PPT/PDF file is a draft of the text file of the same name that accompanies it. It attempts to do graphically what the other one does verbally. Ethnographies of Indigenous Australian language groups suggest that their populations were consistently small, averaging perhaps 500 people each, while classical models of their kinship systems consiste...

The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, or SCCS (Murdock and White 1969), is a cumulative and collaborative data-base of coded variables on maximally diverse and ethno-graphically best-described societies used by scholars in the social sciences. The champion of modern cross-cultural and statistical methods, George P. Murdock, in prepara-tion for a stan...

Among many other network-related open problems in historical research is the coupling of regional and long-distance trade networks, from conflicts and wars to the rise and fall of cities and city systems and the historical dynamics of globalization and world-system interactions in Eurasia. Changes in one region, such as China, for example, affect c...

We analyze general price equilibrium mechanisms of production-chain markets, comparing the producer market model proposed by Harrison White with hypothesized network effects on pricing that emerge from empirical analysis of trade relationships among over 8,000 firms in a large-scale industrial district in Tokyo. Consistent with White’s model, the s...

We propose a model for network formation and study some of its statistical properties. The motivation for the model comes from the growth of several kinds of real networks (i.e., kinship and trading networks, networks of corporate alliances, networks of autocatalytic chemical reactions). These networks grow either by establishing closer connections...

The Structure and Dynamics eJournal offers a conduit for refereed electronic publication, debate, and editorial communication in the domain of anthropology and human sciences. We invite you—as an open access reader at no cost, an author at no cost, or a volunteer, to submit book reviews or commentary—to contribute and to participate in raising the...

Ring cohesion, as a theory relevant to social cohesion, offers itself in the analysis of matrimonial relinking as an outgrowth of a structural approach: «Structural studies are, in the social sciences, the indirect outcome of moderndevelopments in mathematics which have given increasing importante to the qualitative point of view in contradistincti...

In inaugurating the Structure and Dynamics journal, we offer a conduit for refereed electronic publication, debate, and editorial communication in the domain of anthropology and human sciences. We as editors dedicate our effort to facilitating and disseminating interdisciplinary discussion and research in anthropology and related sciences. We invit...

A field experiment conducted in Central Australia in 1971–1972 explored differ- ences between what Aborigines actually did and what they said they did when anthro- pologists interviewed them. Fieldwork entailed observing behavior and recording it in numerically coded forms; analysis entails extracting patterns computationally that would not appear...

We develop and test, using McFadden's discrete choice statistical modeling applied to network dynamics, four alternative logics of attachment - - accumulative advantage, homophily, follow-the-trend, and multiconnectivity - - to account for the development of interorganizational collaboration in the field of biotechnology. The commercial field of th...

The introductory chapter introduces and illustrates four propositions about network theory and emergence: 1. Networks have structural properties (local and global) that have important feedback on behavior and cognition. This section reviews the probabilistic and scaling theories of network topology and dynamics, evidence for feedback process in net...

Social action is situated in fields that are simultaneously composed of interpersonal ties and relations among organizations, which are both usefully characterized as social networks. We introduce a novel approach to distinguishing different network macro-structures in terms of cohesive subsets and their overlaps. We develop a vocabulary that relat...

The paper deals with matrimonial rings, a particular kind of cycles in kinship networks which result when spouses are linked to each other by ties of consanguinity or affinity. By taking a network-analytic perspective, the paper endeavours to put this classical issue of structural kinship theory on a general basis, such as to allow conclusions whic...

Ring cohesion, as a theory relevant to social cohesion, offers itself in the analysis of matrimonial relinking as an outgrowth of a structural approach: "Structural studies are, in the social sciences, the indirect outcome of modern developments in mathematics which have given increasing importance to the qualitative point of view in contradistinct...

Network analysis, an area of mathematical anthropology and sociology crucial to the linking of theory and observation, developed dramatically in recent decades. This made possible a new understanding of social dynamics as a synthesis of network theories. Concrete links can be identified between the actions of self-reflective agents, with rich infor...

this paper have been fully explored, but selected applications to formal organizations may provide useful examples. We begin with some of the early work on PSC Theory by Friedkin, then move to a test of PSC hypotheses by Moody and White (2003), and end by considering some of the unpublished findings of Powell et al (2002) on the biotech industry

Network analysis, an area of mathematical anthropology and sociology crucial to the linking of theory and observation, developed dramatically in recent decades. This made possible a new understanding of social dynamics as a synthesis of network theories. Concrete links can be identified between the actions of self-reflective agents, with rich infor...

Although questions about social cohesion lie at the core of our discipline, definitions are often vague and difficult to operationalize. Here, research on social cohesion and social embeddedness is linked by developing a concept of structural cohesion based on network node connectivity. Structural cohesion is defined as the minimum number of actors...

CROSS TABULATIONS / White Cross tabulations of qualitative data are a fundamental tool of empirical research. Their interpretation in terms of testing hypotheses requires a number of relatively simple concepts in statistical analysis that derive from probability theory. When strictly independent events having two characteristics that are independen...

This paper presents the first research results of the Cross-Cultural Cumulative Coding Center (CCCCC), a unit established at the University of Pittsburgh in May, 1968, with support from the National Science Foundation. It offers to scholars a representative sample of the world's known and well described cultures, 186 in number, each "pinpointed" to...

The members of every community can be thought of as linked by a network of one-to-one ties between people who are related to one another as friends, neighbors, relatives, or coworkers. The distance between any two people is the minimum number of steps through ties in the network needed to go from one to the other. A common and unusual characteristi...

We examine data on and models of small world properties and parameters of social networks. Our focus, on tie-strength, multilevel networks and searchability in strong-tie social networks, allows us to extend some of the questions and findings of recent research and the fit of small world models to sociological and anthropological data on human comm...

Much work in complexity theory employs agent-based models in simulations of systems of multiple agents. Agent interaction follows some standard types of network topologies. My aim is to assess how recent advances in the statistical modeling of social ...

While questions about social cohesion lie at the core of our discipline, definitions are often vague and difficult to operationalize. We link research on social cohesion and social embeddedness by developing a conception of structural cohesion based on network nodeconnectivity. Structural cohesion is defined as the minimum number of actors who, if...

Contributions to complexity theory in relation to social organization are given by original proofs in graph theory that show the structural conditions that maximize the probability of finding shortest-step solutions to problem-solving from start to goal in a network through a set of random paths. The proofs link findings in simulation models, such...

A network approach to economic organization, kinship systems and complexity dynamics is used to explore nomadic pastoralism as a socio-natural system. Graph theoretic measures of network cohesion are related to issues of the emergence, transformation and decay of social and economic networks and their sustainability and resilience in relation to th...

Abstract. This study shows various ways that formal graph theoretic statements map patterns of network ties into substantive hypotheses about social cohesion. If network cohesion is enhanced by multiple connections between members of a group, for example, then the higher the global minimum of the number of independent paths that connect every pair...

this paper to the memory of Oystein Ore Several mathematical models have been proposed for kinship studies. We propose an alternate structural model designed to be so simple logically and intuitively that it can be understood and used by anyone, with a minimum of complication. It is called a P-system, which is short for parental system. The P-syste...

This paper derives from an experiment in quantitative fieldwork, conducted in Central Aus- tralia in 1971-72, that was designed explicitly to explore differences between what Aborigi- nes actually did and what they said they did when anthropologists interviewed them. Here we use genealogical network analysis in relation to data collected in this ex...

This chapter deals with the social integration and its boundaries. How is a particular locality integrated? How are social frontiers constructed in a region? How is locality inccribed within the larger economic and sociopolitical spheres? Este capítulo trata sobre fronteras e integración social: ¿De qué manera está integrada socialmente una locali...

1 What is Cross-Cultural Research? Human communities have a variety of practices, beliefs, social roles, norms, expressions, forms of organization and conflicts (economic, political, legal, religious, expressive and artistic) that exhibit various sorts of internal coherence as well as cleavages within communities. These coherences and cleavages bea...

The focus of this AAA symposium is on cultural idea systems as logical structures with instantiating logics of practice. We turn this notion on its head to look first at social models of networked kinship and marriage behaviors that in the case of what we call sidedness are easily available to participants in a local culture as high level logics of...

this paper, we present an approximation algorithm which gives good lower bounds on numbers of node-independent paths between any pair of nodes on a directed or undirected graph in worstcase time which is linear in the graph size. A variant of the same algorithm can also calculate all the k-components of a graph in the same approximation. Our algori...

This study shows several ways that formal graph theoretic statements map patterns of network ties into substantive hypotheses about social cohesion. If network cohesion is enhanced by multiple connections between members of a group, for example, then the higher the global minimum of the number of independent paths that connect every pair of nodes i...

A network approach to economic organization, kinship systems and complexity dynamics is used to explore some of the laws governing socio-natural systems for the case of nomadic pastoralism. No pretense is made of the accuracy of this provisional formulation. Nomadism is a case where regularities are particularly evident, however. Some of the regula...

...helps to solve five key conceptual problems of network studies of kinship, including that of identifying subgroup boundaries. As a solution to these problems, the p-graph approach has proven an invaluable aid to analysis of kinship, marriage and genealogical networks. It is the default option for genealogical datasets (up to 990,000 nodes) in th...

Five key problems of kinship networks are boundedness, cohesion, size and cohesive relinking, types of relations and relinking, and groups or roles. Approaches to solving these problems include formats available for electronic storage of genealogical data and representations of genealogies using graphs. P-graphs represent couples and uncoupled chil...

This article presents and illustrates a new methodology for testing hypotheses about the departure of marriage choices from baseline models of random mating in an actual kinship and marriage network of a human population. The fact that demographic constraints can drastically affect the raw frequencies of different types of marriage suggests that we...

Dual organization is a unifying concept underlying seemingly dissimilar alliance structures. We explore this idea with reference to lowland South America where dual organization is common. We have chosen, however, to place primary emphasis on the patterning of actual marriage networks. Our aim is to identify the invariant properties of such network...

The problem central to this study, of delineating the properties that qualify individuals as members of a class, was opened by Bourdieu: "The individuals grouped in a class that is constructed in a particular respect[such as a socio-occupational category taken as an indicator of position in the relations of production governing economic practices]...

This article, one of a series, approaches the topics of marriage and kinship through a revitalized kinetic structural approach that shifts the primary focus from abstract models of rules, terminologies, attitudes and norms to exploration of concrete relations in a population, analyzed graph-theoretically in their full complexity as networks. Networ...

This article, one of a series, approaches the topics of marriage and kinship through a revitalized kinetic structural approach that shifts the primary focus from abstract models of rules, terminologies, attitudes and norms to exploration of concrete relations in a population, analyzed graph-theoretically in their full complexity as networks. Networ...

Confusions between substantive and relational concepts of kinship as a social network have led to a number of problems that are clarified by a temporally ordered relational theory of network structure. The ordered-network approach gives rise to a novel means of graphing the social field of kinship relations, while allowing kinship to be locally def...

Statistical entailment analysis (White, 1984; White and McCann, 1988 Social Structures: Form and Behaviour in Social Life) (Cambridge University Press) pp. 380–404) aims first at a rigorous evaluation of null hypotheses of statistical independence as a potential source of binary data structure, and second at constructing a discrete structure (Boole...

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This paper generalizes Freeman's geodesic centrality measures for betweenness on undirected graphs to the more general directed case. Four steps are taken. The point centrality measure is first generalized for directed graphs. Second, a unique maximally centralized graph is defined for directed graphs, holding constant the numbers of points with re...

A modification of Fisher's exact test for the 2 x 2 x 2 contingency table is proposed as a test of the null hypothesis of no three-way statistical in teraction among variables, controlling for the two-way or first-order correlations. The test uses a truncated hypergeometric distribution, limited by the bivariate marginal totals of the variables. Po...

This paper generalizes Freeman's geodesic centrality measures for betweenness on undirected graphs to the more general directed case. Four steps are taken. The point centrality measure is first generalized for directed graphs. Second, a unique maximally centralized graph is defined for directed graphs, holding constant the numbers of points with re...