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Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Sociological Foundations of Computational Social Science -- Chapter 3. Methodological contributions of computational social science to sociology -- Chapter 4. Computational Social Science: A Complex Contagion -- Chapter 5. Model of meaning -- Chapter 6. Sociological Meaning of Contagion -- Chapter 7. Polarization of Opinion -- Chapter 8. Coda.

This book provides solid sociological foundations to computational social science (CSS). CSS is an emerging research field, and many books with those words in the title are on the market. However, CSS has not become mainstream in sociology, for which there are two reasons. First, CSS does not necessarily solve major research questions in sociology. Second, its sociological foundations are weak. These two reasons are interrelated-that is, CSS cannot solve major research questions because its sociological foundations are weak. Thus, even if it tries to solve those questions, its approaches seem to mainstream sociologists to miss the point. To resolve that shortcoming, this book fills the gap between CSS and sociology, shows that CSS can solve major research questions in sociology, and advances sociology by introducing to it theories and methodologies of CSS

Despite considerable scholarly attention on the institutional and normative aspects of development cooperation, its longitudinal dynamics unfolding at the global level have rarely been investigated. Focusing on aid, we examine the evolving global structure of development cooperation induced by aid flows in its entirety. Representing annual aid flows between donors and recipients from 1970 to 2013 as a series of networks, we apply hierarchical stochastic block models to extensive aid-flow data that cover not only the aid behavior of the major OECD donors but also that of other emerging donors, including China. Despite a considerable degree of external expansion and internal diversification of aid relations over the years, the analysis has uncovered a temporally persistent structure of aid networks. The latter comprises, on the one hand, a limited number of major donors with far-reaching resources and, on the other hand, a large number of mostly poor but globally well-connected recipients. The results cast doubt on the efficacy of recurrent efforts for "aid reform" in substantially changing the global aid flow pattern.