Knowledge Matters™

I purchased this book on the recommendation of a colleague. Unusually for me it has taken many months to read, and I have found it a hard slog - I simply could not maintain my interest. The content is dense and at times challenging.

The authors bring together several theories to come up with an integrative framework to research communication networks. By combining several approaches they seek to move from descriptive and exploratory techniques to inferential and confirmatory models - this was the attraction of the book for me; unfortunately in the end I wasn't completely convinced. That said I do agree that networks should be examined on multiple levels and that a multi-theoretical approach has considerable merit.

Given networks lend themselves to visual analysis I was disappointed with the lack of explanatory diagrams in the book - in my view this is a major weakness that could easily be rectified in future editions. Complete beginners may find some of the inferential statistics daunting, but I think they are essential to the argument. I'm not a mathematician so at times I found myself reading the book in parallel with a mathematics text.

So all in all I would give the book a four-star rating - three stars for readability and five stars for a novel approach to network research. It has a place on the bookshelf of every serious student of network analysis.

Regards Graham