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This book addresses a phenomenon that has been much studied in anthropology, sociology and administrative science - the social structural foundations of coordinated activity and consensus in complexly differentiated communities and organizations. Such foundations are important because social differentiation makes coordination and agreement especially hard to achieve and maintain. Friedkin focuses on the process of social influence, and on how this process, when it is played out in a network of interpersonal influence, may result in interpersonal agreements among actors who are located in different parts of a complexly differentiated organization. This work builds on structural role analysis which provides a description of the pattern of social differentiation in a population. Interpretation of the revealed social structures has long been a problem. The steps for structural analysis that are proposed in this book are addressed to the above problem. To explain the coordination of social positions, the author pursues the development of a structural social psychology that attends to both social structure and process

This article investigates the evolution of power with a formal theory that focuses on the influence network through which control of a group's outcomes emerges via direct and indirect interpersonal influences on group members' positions on a series of issues over time. Power evolves when individuals' openness or closure to interpersonal influences correspond with their prior relative control over the group's issue outcomes. In groups with members who are appraising the relative power of their members over the outcomes of prior issues, a mechanism of "reflected appraisals" will elevate and dampen members' self-appraisals of their relative power and the amount of influence they accord to others. Across a series of issues over time, this mechanism suffices to generate state transitions of a group's influence network. The result is an evolution of the group's influence network such that, with rare exceptions, power becomes concentrated and the preferences of a single leader control the group's outcomes via intermediaries. A laboratory experiment and a simulation provide support for the theory. The analysis suggests that the evolution of the influence network toward concentrated forms of power and control is generated by fundamental social psychological responses to power and may occur in all enduring social groups whose members are dealing with a lengthy sequence of issues, independent of the conditions of bureaucratic organizations.

Investigators interested in developing a general theory of social cohesion are confronted with a complex body of work that involves various definitions of social cohesion, specialized literatures on particular dimensions of social cohesion (e.g., membership turnover, organizational commitment, categorical identifications, interpersonal attachments, network structures), and lines of inquiry focused on the social cohesion of specific types of groups (e.g., families, schools, military units, and sports teams). This review addresses the problem of integrating the individual and group levels at which social cohesion has been defined. It also develops a perspective on social cohesion as a domain of causally interrelated phenomena concerned with individuals' membership attitudes and behaviors, in which the major dimensions of social cohesion occupy different theoretical positions with respect to one another as antecedent, intervening, or outcome variables.

"Social influence network theory presents a mathematical formalization of the social process of attitude changes that unfolds in a social network of interpersonal influences. This book brings the theory to bear on lines of research in the domain of small group dynamics concerned with changes of group members' positions on an issue, including the formation of consensus and of settled disagreement, via endogenous interpersonal influences, in which group members are responding to the displayed positions of the members of the group. Social influence network theory advances a dynamic social cognition mechanism, in which individuals are weighing and combining their own and others' positions on an issue in the revision of their own positions. The influence network construct of the theory is the social structure of the endogenous interpersonal influences that are involved in this mechanism. With this theory, the authors seek to lay the foundation for a better formal integration of classical and current lines of work on small groups in psychological and sociological social psychology"--