No abstract

Description:The social sciences, especially economics, management, and organizational science, are experiencing a tremendous renewed interest for their epistemological and methodological statutes, as witnessed by the many books and specialized journals established during the last two decades. Relational Methodologies and Epistemology in Economics and Management Sciencesidenti es and presents the four main network-based methodologies including network analysis, Boolean network simulation modeling, arti cial neural network simulation modeling, and agentbased simulation modeling in addition to their conceptual-epistemological implications and concrete applications within the social and natural sciences.

No abstract

Do trading countries also collaborate in R&D? This is the question that, facing with a number of methodological problems, here it is dealt with. Studying and comparing the international trade network and the R&D collaboration network of European countries in the aerospace sector, social network analysis offers a wide spectrum of methods and criteria either to make them comparable or to evaluate its similarity. International trade is a 1-mode directed and valued network, while the EU-subsidized R&D collaboration is an affiliation (2-mode) undirected and unvalued network, and the elementary units of this latter are organizations and not countries. Therefore, to the aim to make these two networks comparable, this paper shows and discusses a number of methodological problems and solutions offered to solve them, and provides a multi-faceted comparison in terms of various statistical and topological indicators. A comparative analysis of the two networks structures is made at aggregate and disaggregate level, and it is shown that the common centralization index is definitively inappropriate and misleading when applied to multi-centered networks like these, and especially to the R&D collaboration network. The final conclusion is that the two networks resemble in some important aspects, but differ in some minor traits. In particular, they are both shaped in a core-periphery structure, and in both cases important countries tend to exchange or collaborate more with marginal countries than between themselves.

This chapter presents and discusses some methodological issues in the application of stochastic actor-oriented modeling for longitudinal network analysis. By following a forward-selection procedure, three models will be defined and run on four observations of the collaboration network subsidized by the European Union Framework Programmes in the Aerospace sector, covering a 20-years time span (1994-2013). Specifically, the influence exerted by five dimensions of inter-organizational proximity (geographical, organizational, social, institutional and technological) on the longitudinal evolution of the network is analyzed. Results show that organizational proximity is the most important driver for the longitudinal evolution of the network. Further, this form of proximity is constant in time, analogously to the geographical one which, on its side, only moderately affects network's evolution. Network proximity plays a weak but positive influence, while the institutional and technological dimensions do not affect the evolution of the network. Anyway, when proximity is evaluated on single institutional and technological types, different roles are detected. Organizations' patenting activity, introduced as a control variable, does not play a significant role on network's evolution.