Social Network Analysis at the 2021 Annual Conference of the Italian Society for Economic Sociology (SISEC)

Antonello Podda;Federico Bianchi;Niccolò Casnici

2021-01-01

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Abstract

The Italian Society for Economic Sociology (SISEC) is a national association that aims to represent Italy-based scholars in economic sociology, the sociology of work and labour markets, and the sociology of organisations. Its last two conferences included rich and highly participated sessions on applications of Social Network Analysis (SNA). In its most basic form, SNA allows researchers to model social relations by means of graph theory as a set of nodes (or vertices) – representing individual or collective actors – and ties (or edges) – representing relations between nodes. Recent advances in SNA have provided scholars with more sophisticated modelling techniques which allow statistical inference, thereby overcoming many limits of standard descriptive, case-based SNA. After setting the stage, this note summarizes the works on SNA presented at the 5th SISEC annual conference, hosted by the University of Catania in 2021.