The other day I talked with Jonathan Agwe from the World Bank (WB) about the possibilities of making the Innovation Systems Approach more accessible and innovativeness more measureable by using Social Network Approaches. His excited reaction made me smile because it reminded me of my own first reaction to Social Network Analysis: “I didn’t know there was a method behind the stuff that I have been trying to do all along!”
To me that is the greatest thing about Social Network Analysis, that it is so closely linked to the way that we (or at least some of us) deal with the complex and confusing world anyway and that it just channels and structures it in a way that (slightly…) cleans up the mess and allows us to see the mayor structures in the social landscape.
This might be one reason why I have little patience with authors who make it all sound so abstract and difficult to understand that it seems like a secret science rather than a practical tool to better understand the real world.
Filed under: theoretical considerations
