UCD Geary Institute
Research, Analysis, Evidence
Power, decision-making and social networks conference — 25–27 August 2010
8 July 2010
The Geary Institute has received funding from the European Science Foundation for a 2 day conference entitled Power, decision-making and social networks which will be held from 25–27 August 2010 in the seminar room of UCD CASL, Dublin, Ireland.
This seminar is organized jointly by Diane Payne (University College Dublin) and Christofer Edling (Jacobs University, Germany) as part of the European Science Foundation’s network programme to support research in quantitative social sciences (QMSS 2).
Seminar Topic
Social network studies of power and decision making focus the research analysis on the dynamic social interactions between actors embedded in collective action scenarios. There is a long tradition of studying elite power in organizational decision making and policy networks. For example, studies of interlocking directorships are used to explore how social ties between members of corporate boards may facilitate political cohesion, more so than shared economic interests or geographical location. In the policy network studies, researchers focus on the formation of state-interest organization networks, their persistence and change over time, and the consequences of network structures for public policy-making outcomes, as well as the consequences of the embedded nature of policy making for alternative collective decision processes such as persuasion, vote trading or coercion. Numerous structural accounts of collective movements such as protest movements and others point to findings which suggest how individual ties combine into more complex network patterns, to affect the proportion of people willing to contribute to a cause, or the intensity of participation in a certain population. The more recent debate on the role of computer mediated communication (CMC) in the social movement literature asks whether the opportunities available through this new medium of communication is capable of creating new social ties or just the enhancement of existing ‘real’, ‘face-to-face’, ties.
