Basic Social Network Books and Articles

Social network analysis was conceived of as a way of empirically studying group interaction not excluding the experience of the members of the network.

The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell Best Price $2.00 or Buy New $6.91	The Tipping Point is an engaging, best selling book that touches on some of the considerations of SNA. His idea of "connectors," "salesmen," and "mavens" is not something you will find widely in SNA research, but Mark Granovetter once said that "it is the best description of what I do, I wish I had written it myself."
The Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg Malcolm Gladwell	While you are waiting for your copy of The Tipping Point to arrive from Amazon, you can read Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker article that led to the book.
Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness Mark Granovetter	Economic activity, acting in one's best interest, cannot be understood outside of the networks of relationships in which we are all embbed. This is a paper that has far reaching influence, beyond sociology and economics and into even business and information systems. It is
The Strength of Weak Ties Mark Granovetter	No single paper has had as much influence on thinking about social networks as this one. It gives the basic ideas of how resources are distributed in society and how society is organized from a network point of view.
Orgnet	Valdis Krebs is a pioneer of using network analysis to help organizations function better. This site has a wide variety of readable information about networks.
Linked Albert-Laszlo Bara... Best Price $3.23 or Buy New $10.40 Privacy Information	This book is about the properties of networks in general. Network research is being done in physics, chemistry, and other "hard" sciences and it is tantalizing that there may be underlying relationships.
Identities, Boundaries, and Social T... Charles Tilly Best Price $20.00 or Buy New $23.70 Privacy Information	This book is a view of "things" in our social world like idenities and boundaries as the result of social ties: relationships. It does not take networks as the center of his thinking but still shows ways that relations influence our world. It shows how boundaries and identities can be explained by social relations so psychological elplainations of "identity" are unnecessary.

Innovation and Creativity

How Breakthroughs Happen Andrew Hargadon Best Price $15.76 or Buy New $18.65 Privacy Information	This is another book on the relational nature of creativity and innovations. Though it only occasionally mentions "social networks," one of its major points is that creativity needs to be thought of as a collaborative process and social networks are a way of talking about collaboration.
The Social Origin of Good Ideas Ronald Burt	This is another paper that discusses innovation as borrowing ideas from one social world to another.
Social Networks, the Tertius Iungens Orientation, and Involvement in Innovation David Obstfeld	This remarkable study reinforces the idea of innovation as social, but introduces the idea of Terius Iungens, "the third who joins," a person that brings together different social worlds and drives