What social ties are and how they operate depends on the cultural context constitutive of their meaning. Pursuing an explanatory account for the cultural embeddedness of social ties, we draw on Verstehende sociology and rely on in-depth insight into subjective perceptions developed by social network actors throughout their practice to represent symbolic and material contexts of social ties structurally. We put forward a new mixed data collection and processing approach that ethnographically maps interconnected three-layer socio-cultural networks of individuals, signs, and material objects. Opening cultural contexts to application of formal and statistical techniques, this approach allows for an 'interpretive explanation' of social ties. Illustrating the approach with our own longitudinal study of five European art groups, we discuss the peculiarities of three-layer socio-cultural data collection and processing, the new discoveries enabled, the challenges encountered, the solutions we came up with, and the utility of this approach for conducting 'Verstehende network analysis' in various fields of application.

Original languageEnglish
JournalSocial Networks
Early online date4 Apr 2021
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021

    Scopus subject areas

  • Social Sciences(all)
  • Psychology(all)
  • Anthropology
  • Sociology and Political Science

    Research areas

  • Cultural context, Mixed method, Network data, Three-layer socio-cultural network, Verstehende network analysis

ID: 72144136