Core-Periphery Structure in Networks

Resilience to climate change in a cross-scale tourism governance context: a combined quantitative-qualitative network analysis

“…The analysis and interpretation of social networks is based upon the existence of structures on different network scales, differentiating the local (single node), meso (intermediate, groups of nodes), and global (whole network level) scales (Rombach et al 2014). The meso-scale network structure, such as a community structure or a core-periphery structure, deserves special attention since it allows for insights into network features that are not apparent on the local or global network scale (Rombach et al 2014).…”

“…The meso-scale network structure, such as a community structure or a core-periphery structure, deserves special attention since it allows for insights into network features that are not apparent on the local or global network scale (Rombach et al 2014). Communities, in a network science understanding (not to be mistaken with communities or municipalities in a governance understanding) are subgroups or clusters with a larger density of ties between nodes than to any nodes belonging to a different subnetwork (Boccaletti et al 2006).…”

“…Core-periphery structures exist when a small number of central actors or hubs hold a disproportionate amount of connections, while most other nodes maintain few relationships (Girvan and Newman 2002, Guimerà et al 2003, Newman and Girvan 2004, Guimerà and Amaral 2005a, Hojman and Szeidl 2008, Rombach et al 2014. A substantial variety of connections within the core as well as from the core to more peripheral actors (resulting in a broker/gatekeeper position of some of the central actors) have been shown to be ideal for the overall innovative capacity of a social network in a regional governance context (Ter Wal andBoschma 2009, Kauffeld-Monz andFritsch 2013).…”

“…A system with a high degree of diversity of actors and ties allows for the integration of information between subgroups as well as between the core and the periphery of the system, while allowing the actors to acquire ideas from the outside (see Luthe et al 2012 for a more extensive discussion). Despite its wide use, the core-periphery concept still lacks a formal definition for the separation of the core from the periphery, though a number of intuitive understandings have been mentioned in the literature (e.g., Breiger 1981, Wasserman and Faust 1994, Scott 2013, Rombach et al 2014) and reviewed by Borgatti and Everett (2000). Empirically supported examples of the core-periphery concept include networks of disease dynamics (Kitchovitch and Liò 2011), spatial group interaction (Onnela et al 2011), scientific collaboration and citations (Mullins et al 1977, Newman 2004, friendship (Adaic and Adar 2003), advice in the workplace (Cross et al 2001), and interlocking directorates of corporations (Mizruchi 1996).…”

Asymmetry through time dependency

“…However, even after simplifying down to the level of nodes and edges, there is typically too much information for us to digest, and we must rely on tools that further reduce the dimension of the system so that we can summarize and visualize key properties. The need to reveal hidden structure and substructure within a complex network has motivated a plethora of quantitative tools aimed at, for example, discovering significant nodes or edges, and topological features such as well-connected communities, bipartite structures, bottlenecks, motifs, hubs and authorities [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. In this work we focus on the idea of quantifying and visualizing the level of asymmetry in a network, and in particular, studying asymmetry caused by the arrow of time in a dynamic network sequence.…”