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Young women in Manenberg are often identified by their exposure to violence in the community within which they live. They are perceived as grieving mothers, daughters and victims. However, women in Manenberg are also visible as strategists to contesting violence and who are resilient to violent activity. Ungar defines resilience as a defence mechanism (dependent on context and cultural factors) that youth use to cope with adversity, and in this case, everyday gang violence. Current research in Manenberg falls short of revealing the experiences of gang violence by young women as complex and multifaceted. This study demonstrates women as more than victims of youth gang violence (as often portrayed in the media). This paper examines young women, their social networks and resilience to gang violence through the lens of their responses to dominant discourses of youth gang violence in the streets of Manenberg. Through "intimate" discussions, the formations of networks highlight multiple overlaps in the making of young women; their resilience, their homes and lives in the streets of Manenberg. Our discussions transcend normative gendered perspectives and produce knowledge from their interactions as a useful lens for informing how young women negotiate around the activities of gang violence in their everyday lives. The paper reveals meaning-making of gang violence, as well as interfaces and disruptions of social networks among young women in Manenberg.

Online political astroturfing—hidden information campaigns in which a political actor mimics genuine citizen behavior by incentivizing agents to spread information online—has become prevalent on social media. Such inauthentic information campaigns threaten to undermine the Internet's promise to more equitable participation in public debates. We argue that the logic of social behavior within the campaign bureaucracy and principal–agent problems lead to detectable activity patterns among the campaign's social media accounts. Our analysis uses a network-based methodology to identify such coordination patterns in all campaigns contained in the largest publicly available database on astroturfing published by Twitter. On average, 74% of the involved accounts in each campaign engaged in a simple form of coordination that we call co-tweeting and co-retweeting. Comparing the astroturfing accounts to various systematically constructed comparison samples, we show that the same behavior is negligible among the accounts of regular users that the campaigns try to mimic. As its main substantive contribution, the paper demonstrates that online political astroturfing consistently leaves similar traces of coordination, even across diverse political and country contexts and different time periods. The presented methodology is a reliable first step for detecting astroturfing campaigns.

Existing IR studies have underlined how much International organizations' strategies have evolved. The most obvious transformation is the increase of networked forms of conflict management arrangements such as simultaneous peace operations, ad-hoc coalitions, joint programs or joint opinions. These forms of interventions, characterized by the co-involvement of several types of actors challenge both realistic views of third parties' cooperation in conflicts and methodological approaches of this phenomenon. In this paper, I propose to use the new Database on Inter-Organizational Relations in Conflicts (DIORc) in order to compare, with a social network perspective, the interplay between inter-governmental organizations in two conflicts. The aim of the paper is twofold: first, the network perspective is used to open the black box of multipartite intervention. Cooperation is designed as an affiliation network where 'actors' represent the IGO's institutions (parliaments.) and 'events' are conflict management activities in which actors are involved. Secondly, this paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of cooperation in peace and conflicts. The contemporary conflict management doctrine is based on a comprehensive approach that includes two aspects: First, all the dimensions of a conflict should be addressed and second, institutional overlapping should be avoided through the division of labor between conflict managers. However, analysis of the level of coordination temper the comprehensive argument, suggesting that collaborative advantage rather linked to legitimacy than efficiency. Second, following Putman (2000)'s distinction between 'bridging' and 'bonding', this paper shows that transorganizational actions occur more frequently between homogeneous groups of institutions than across divers groups.

Concepts taken from graph theory and other branches of topology have been used by many sociologists and social psychologists, in particular Kurt Lewin and J. L. Moreno. Similar ideas have been used to construct statistical models of nervous systems, and these have been applied by J. S. Coleman and others to the spread of information and other social phenomena. The study of social networks by anthropologists has been based, knowingly or unknowingly, on the basic notions of graph theory, as has the identification and analysis of social cliques. There is little consensus among mathematicians about terminology, and social scientists have drawn fortuitously on various mathematical vocabularies as well as inventing their own technical terms. Applied to social networks, the words `connectedness' and `connectivity' may refer to properties of the distance between persons, the number of paths between them, whether there is a path at all, or the proportion of possible paths actually in existence. These different usages are contrasted by restating them all in the terminology set out in Structural models (1965) by Harary, Norman and Cartwright.

This study examined the impact of mothers' involvement with their social networks upon their self‐reported changes in behaviors and attitudes due to a parenting intervention—in this case monthly, age‐paced parenting newsletters. Path analyses revealed that discussing and sharing newsletter copies with others was associated with greater self‐reported change but did not significantly mediate the relationship between newsletter use and parental change. Rather, individual use of the newsletter and social sharing of the content had independent effects on parenting. The results support a general view that the advice of parenting programs is not accepted or rejected in a vacuum, but often within the context of discussions within the participants' existing social networks. This suggests two practical implications for program developers: (a) Interventions might be more effective if they encouraged such social network processing of program advice, and (b) programs might even target social networks rather than individual parents as their clients.

Service-orientierte Online-Communitys (Abk.: SOOC) wie Airbnb, Uber, Couchsurfing oder BlaBlaCar werden auch in Deutschland immer beliebter. Ein konzeptionelles Modell zu Vertrauen in SOOC bietet durch den Einbezug der empirischen Erkenntnisse eine plausible Erweiterung der kommunikationswissenschaftlichen Vertrauensforschung, die den Blick auf die Nutzerinnen und Nutzer als Ausgangspunkt der Zuschreibung richtet. So werden traditionelle, kommunikationswissenschaftliche Forschungstraditionen, die sich vorwiegend mit der Glaubwürdigkeit der Medien beschäftigen, durch einen user-zentrierten Ansatz abgelöst, der die Spezifika von SOOC zu fassen vermag. Im funktionalistischen Sinne nimmt Vertrauen in Systemen die Funktion der Komplexitätsreduktion ein und ermöglicht so Handlungen unter Risiko. Beispiel für riskante Handlungen ist hier die Nutzung von Online-Mitfahrgelegenheitsportalen

Various network paradigm approaches are increasing in significance in the field of social-spatial sciences. In recent times, scholars engaged in research related to spatial features have more frequently grasped and explained social structures and discourses using an analytical network perspective. A relatively young strand of Social Network Analysis (SNA) is Visual Network Research, which uses network maps to gather and analyse social relationships, mostly using participative methods. This article discusses the specific possibilities and challenges that emerge by applying a visual network perspective in social- spatial sciences. Therefore, two different tools for visual data collection are introduced by presenting exemplary case studies that discuss the processes of space constitution. Net-Map is a pen-and-paper tool and is meant to manually draw multiplex networks in cooperation with interview partners or focus groups. By doing so, qualitative and quantitative network data are collected. Additionally, the influence, aims and roles of different actors are evaluated in relation, for example, to spatial scales or resources. The VennMaker tool offers cooperative network reconstruction through computer software. It generates a digital network map, collects quantitative relational and attributive data and provides a simultaneous qualitative triangulation of these data. Finally, the article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the different tools and suggests a conceptual and methodological combination of Visual Network Research and the relational sociology of space for a richer understanding of social action and space.

Research on organizational commitment has generally ignored the role that social networks may play in shaping work-related attitudes. In this article, we explore two network-based mechanisms: (a) structural position effects, based on centrality, and (b) social influence, based on direct social contact with peers. Relying on network, survey, and administrative data for more than 400 employees in 21 different organizations, our findings suggest that both structural position and social influence are associated with organizational commitment. These findings have important implications for how public organizations structure work teams, hire and promote employees, and engage in reform efforts.

The decision–making processes involved at various stages in the out–migration of individuals from remote parts of rural Scotland are examined. Some two hundred migrants, now residing throughout the United Kingdom, were traced using a variety of means. Quantitative and qualitative research methods were incorporated so that the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches complement and counterbalance each other. The investigation focuses on the changing role of family and other networks at each stage. It is found that there is a general expectation and acceptance of the need for young adults to leave rural areas. Initially, individual migrants benefit from the role of immediate or extended family and social networks, although the individual is not always conscious of their role. With time away from the home area these networks decline in importance, only to re–emerge later in life. At this stage the individual is more likely to be a benefactor than a beneficiary in the process.

Political parties use the internet, and social media in particular, for fundraising, advertising, and mobilizing to achieve desirable ends. Local parties are first and foremost organizations, and so as they make their decisions, they have to use their resources wisely. Through our analysis of over 6000 county-level Democratic and Republican parties in the United States, we find a high degree of variation in the use of social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) by parties. In explaining this variation, we focus on parties as organizations and so find the choice to use social media and their overall activity on it reflects the resources available to the party organization, as well as the size of potential audience and the competitiveness of their political environment. These variables explain local Democratic parties better than they explain local Republican parties.

"There are growing accounts of innovative, often collaborative institutional approaches to water management that seem to respond better to new challenges in supply and water quality management. While some describe these new institutional designs as a 'third way', as opposed to traditional state-centered or market-based modes, we find that the most salient features of it to characterize even those effective state or market designs. The fundamental ingredient, which is patterned relationships, is one that arises when social networks are built around the formal (state or market) institutions. The necessary plane of description is not on the dimension of structure (state, market, or otherwise) but in the nature and workings of these relational networks. We describe necessary features of these networks. We illustrate these points with a case study: the Environmental Water Account (EWA), a novel market-based program for negotiating water allocations around the San Francisco Bay-Delta (California, U.S.A.). We point out how this institution worked precisely because it was not merely a market-based program but, rather, built in features of an effective social network. In this way, we found a capacity of the EWA to adapt to the dynamic nature of water resources and needs, along with the uncertainties inherent in a complex social-ecological system." (author's abstract)