Social Networks of Meaning and Communication

Abstract

This talk focuses on some of the key arguments that professor Fuhse has outlined in his recent book Social Networks of Meaning and Communication (Oxford UP). Drawing upon and extending the relational sociology of Harrison White and Charles Tilly, social networks are best theorized as constituted in patterns of expectations that form, reproduce, and change over the course of communicative events. These events are the basic building blocks of the social world. They lead to expectations about the behavior of actors and their interaction with others – the meaning structure making for observable regularities of communication in social networks.