Analyzing Affiliation Networks

In social network analysis, the term “affiliations” usually refers to membership or participation data, such as when we have data on which actors have participated in which events. Often, the assumption is that comembership in groups or events is an indicator of an underlying social tie. For example, Davis Gardner and Gardner (1941) used data provided by the society pages of a local newspaper to uncover distinct social circles among a set of society women. Similarly, Domhoff (1967) and others have used comembership in corporate boards to search for social elites (e.g., Allen, 1974; Carroll, Fox and Ornstein, 1982; Galaskiewicz, 1985; Westphal and Khanna, 2003). Alternatively, we can see co-participation as providing opportunities for social ties to develop, which in turn provide opportunities things like ideas to flow between actors. For example, Davis (1991; Davis and Greeve, 1997) studied the diffusion of corporate practices such as poison pills and golden parachutes. He finds evidence that poison pills diffuse through chains of interlocking directorates, where board members who sit on multiple boards serve as conduits of strategic information between the different firms. An important advantage of affiliation data, especially in the case studying elites, is that affiliations are often observable from a distance (e.g., government records, newspaper reports), without having to have special access to the actors.