Page - (000016) - in Knowledge and Networks

4 (Emirbayer & Goodwin, 1994, p. 1414). It stipulates understanding social phenom- ena such as identity, power, conflict, social capital, and knowledge as expressions and consequences of the positions and associations that actors enjoy or endure within systems of social interdependencies and relations rather than as substantial- ist, monadic entities with predetermined characteristics (Bathelt & Glückler, 2005). In a relational perspective the focus is on individual and collective opportunities for action, and these opportunities are thought of as being facilitated by the specific context and structure of social relations. Beyond early radical relational sociologies, current theories move on, prodded by the founding fathers of contemporary structuralism (e.g., White, 2008) to com- bine relational and categorical approaches as well as relational and cultural perspec- tives that bring classical social science theory and network analyses into a neostructural framework (e.g., Brandes, 2016; Breiger, 1974, 1990, 2010; Snijders, 2005; Snijders & Steglich, in press-b). From these perspectives a relational topol- ogy is also a social space in which specific social processes driven by these relation- ships take place in a meaningful way for the actors themselves (Lazega & Pattison, 2001). Generic social processes examined by the social sciences since their emer- gence (e.g., solidarity and discrimination, collective learning and socialization, social control and conflict resolution, and regulation and institutionalization) are partly the product of the regularities constructed in the management of interdepen- dencies between actors in conflict and/or in cooperation. These processes facilitate the management of collective action’s dilemmas at each level of agency. The role of network analysis evolves toward modeling these processes and helping with theo- rizing them. Building knowledge in individual and collective learning is precisely one such generic process. Such a theoretical perspective necessarily implies an analytical focus on connectivity in social and economic action. Those new theories and con- cepts have been the key ground-breaking insights into models and concepts of knowledge creation and knowledge diffusion. How does knowledge about this generic process benefit from this approach? Network analyses from several angles are useful for answering this question. Learning, knowledge creation, and innova- tion are all fruit of the circulation and interpretation of information, the co-creation of new ideas, cumulative experience, and cognition. People relate to other people inside and outside organizations in order to exchange information, knowledge, goods, services, and capital. The myriad individual and collective actors and the relations they sustain are the building blocks of social networks. Relationships are important for the acquisition of information (Borgatti & Cross, 2003), and the cre- ation of knowledge has been recognized as a social, interactive process (Lawson & Lorenz, 1999). Networks are not merely a representational form of social relations but also a social context. A network is “a specific set of linkages among a defined set of persons, with the additional property that the characteristics of these linkages as a whole may be used to interpret the social behavior of the persons involved” (Mitchell, 1969, p. 2). This definition implies that the specific structure of relations may be used to draw inferences and expectations pertaining to individual and col- J. Glückler et al.