Part IV - Ranking

Summary

Previous chapters paid little attention to the direction of social relations. In matters of cohesion or brokerage, it is more important to know that a tie exists than to know who initiates it. In this part, however, direction is central, especially asymmetry in social relations. Which choices are not reciprocated? Asymmetry in social relations points to social prestige and ranking.

Chapter 9 presents the concept of structural prestige as the reception of direct and indirect positive choices. We compare structural prestige scores with social prestige of persons measured separately to find that there is some but not perfect overlap. In Chapter 10, we discuss techniques to infer informal or latent ranking from the occurrence of different types of triads and acyclic components in a directed network. Finally, Chapter 11 focuses on networks with arcs indicating the passing of time: genealogical networks and citation networks.