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Is social network analysis just measures and methods with no theory? We attempt to clarify some confusions, address some previous critiques and controversies surrounding the issues of structure, human agency, endogeneity, tie content, network change, and context, and add a few critiques of our own. We use these issues as an opportunity to discuss the fundamental characteristics of network theory and to provide our thoughts on opportunities for future research in social network analysis.

Social networks are not just patterns of interaction and sentiment in the real world; they are also cognitive (re)constructions of social relations, some real, some imagined. Focusing on networks as mental entities, our essay describes a new method that relies on stylized network images to gather quantitative data on how people “see” specific aspects of their social worlds. We discuss the logic of our approach, present several examples of “visual network scales,” discuss some preliminary findings, and identify some of the problems and prospects in this nascent line of work on the phenomenology of social networks.

We explore the role of geographic communities in the construction of an organization's identity as narrated in the pages of Martha Stewart Living magazine, the flagship product of the Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia organization. We content analyzed 253 columns published between 1990 and 2004. We found that communities figured prominently in the emergence and institutionalization of the organization's identity, with over 800 mentions of specific places, from Stewart's childhood home of Nutley, New Jersey, to storied Paris, France. We examined how Stewart's use of places compared with descriptions of these same places in the Lonely Planet Travel. Our evidence suggests that the invocation of community enabled the organization to legitimate its product offerings as well as claim and partition complex and sometimes contradictory identity elements that included both highbrow culture and Americana “rural apple-pie goodness.”

The heritability of ASDs reportedly exceeds 90% (Halgin & Whitbourne, 2007; Rutter, 2005), indicating that genetic endowment strongly influences the etiology of these disorders (Halgin & Whitbourne, 2007). Research to date has suggested chromosomes 2, 7, and 15 as possible sites for genetic abnormalities associated with ASDs (Filipek et al., 1999; Halgin & Whitbourne, 2007; Muhle, Trentacoste, & Rapin, 2004; Yonan et al., 2003). However, the genetics of autism is complex and is not yet fully known (Chuthapisith, Ruangdaraganon, Sombuntham, & Roongpraiwan, 2007; Goldberg et al., 2005; Muhle et al., 2004; Ozonoff, South, & Provencal, 2005; Rutter, 2005; Szatmari, Zwaigenbaum, & Bryson, 2004).

In the academic field of business management, several potential theories were established during the last decades to explain companies' decisions, organizational behavior, consumer patterns, and internationalization, among others. As a result, businesses and scholars were able to analyze and decide based on theoretical approaches to explain the current conditions of the market. Secondary research was conducted to collect more than 36 management theories. This chapter aims to develop the most famous theories related to business applied in the international field. The novelty of this chapter relies on the compilation of recognized previous research studies from the academic literature and evidence in international business.