Time: Thursday, 26/June/2025: 3:40pm - 5:20pm Session Chair: Michel Grossetti Session Chair: Sophie Mützel |
Location: Room 108 120 |
What would Harrison say? About recent trends in social network research
Leipzig University, Germany
Harrison White was a towering figure in the development of network research. His passing gives us an opportunity to reflect on recent developments in the field: What might he say about them?
(1) White opposed rational choice modeling, and would probably be critical of Hedström’s program of individual-based analytical sociology. He saw individual identities not as driving forces behind social networks, but as constructed in network processes.
(2) He showed little interest in the study of network mechanisms like homophily, transitivity, and preferential attachment. His focus was on the identification of systematic network patterns specific to institutional fields.
(3) White seems to have ignored ego-centric networks in survey research. He was chiefly concerned with studying the meso-level of full network configurations.
(4) He would probably have been sympathetic to computational social science, with direct connections to pioneers of the field (Carley, DiMaggio, Mohr).
(5) As a trained physicist, White was sympathetic to developments in interdisciplinary network science. However, he was critical of the abstract mathematical modeling of social phenomena without substantially engaging with them.
(6) White would obviously have a strong affinity to relational sociology, but with little interest in theoretical forbears and ontological discussions.
(7) As a quantitative scholar, White was not interested in qualitative methods to study networks. However, the qualitative study of interaction / communication (e.g., with conversation analysis) and of meaning in networks fit his research aims more than qualitative interviews.
Where do restaurants come from?
1Dauphine PSL university, IRISSO Research Center; 2CREST, CNRS, ENSAE, Institut Polytechnique de Paris; 3Université de Lille, Clersé Research center
Among Harrison White's multiple contributions to economic sociology, the 1981 market model stands out as a cornerstone, emphasizing coordination through quality rather than price. In recent years, the rise of digital platform intermediaries has made economic activity more complex. The proposed presentation raises the question of coordination in the restaurants market since the arrival of these platforms. It extends and renews the interest of White’s model by showing that the role of platforms is more to support producers’ coordination through quality – thus aligning with his original perspective – than the matching of supply and demand, as standard economics would have it.
We analyze the effects of a popular booking and review platform on the dine-in restaurant market in the medium-sized city of Lille, France. In line with White’s framework, we conceptualize restaurants as a producers' market where multiple quality conventions — ordinary, advanced, and paradox — coexist with failure area. We instantiate these ideas through a combination of observations, interviews, web-scraping, and business data about 283 restaurants, following a sequential mixed-methods design. In particular, we use MRQAP analysis to show how dyadic similarities and differences in platform use, both by restaurants and by clients, predict their relative position in White’s market structure. We conclude that platforms rationalize firms’ practice of observing one another as a basis to make volume and quality decisions. The rise of digital platforms equips producers with devices that amplify their view of competitors, standardize their offerings, and support the stability of their business choices over time.