The NetLab Network

Guiding Principles

NetLab research has been informed by a set of guiding principles:

• 1.

  The world is composed of networks, not groups. People function more as individuals connected via partial memberships in multiple networks and less as people embedded in tightly-bounded, densely-knit, settled groups.

• 2.

  Many people meet their social, emotional, and economic needs by tapping into multiple, loosely knit networks of diverse associates rather than relying on tight connections to a relatively small number of core associates.

• 3.

  The social structures people are in largely determine the operation of two-person relationships: it is sociology, not psychology. Ties are usually asymmetrically reciprocal, differing in content and intensity.

• 4.

  Ties link network members indirectly as well as directly.

• 5.

  Asymmetric ties and complex networks differentially distribute scarce resources.

• 6.

  Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are usually extensions and enhancers of ongoing relationships. Few people have most of their ties in segregated virtual worlds.

• 7.

  Households have become more networked, with ICTs keeping mobile spouses and their children in contact.

• 8.

  At work, less-formal, fluctuating and specialized peer relationships are common, and the benefits of boss/subordinate hierarchical relationships are less obvious. The organization of work has become more spatially distributed, with ICTs connecting people, and appreciable numbers working at home full or part-time.

• 9.

  As the dividing line between work and home has weakened, so has the more general boundary between the private and public spheres of life. In the less hierarchical and less bounded networked environment where expertise is more in dispute than in the past and where relationships are more tenuous, there is more uncertainty about whom and what information sources to trust.

• 10.

  Social movements arise out of both existing social networks and more organized groups; they rarely are disconnected bunches of alienated individuals.