 Sociopolitical networks are the networks of connections between members within a society which influence and shape collective decision-making and collective action. Sociopolitical networks may involve many overlapping heterogeneous and distributed networks throughout society that influence collective decision-making and the distribution of power. These networks might include social media and communications networks, economic and financial networks, or cultural and ideological networks. The study of sociopolitical networks shifts the focus of political analysis away from an emphasis on the formal political structures of the nation-state and towards the more distributed and complex set of informal social networks within the broader society. The network-approached political science adopts a relational paradigm where social and political phenomena are understood in the context of the relationships between people and groups, which are seen to produce the outcomes that interest political scientists. Such networks are typically non-linear and involve emergent phenomena. As such, the tools of political network analysis differ from the more traditional methods used within the social sciences, namely those of statistical analysis, by looking at and visualizing whole networks of connections. The significance of network theory as a tool for studying sociopolitical phenomena has greatly increased as of the past few decades, with the ongoing proliferation of network forms of organization as industrial societies are becoming transformed into network societies. Network society is the expression coined by social theorists in relation to the social, political, economic and cultural changes caused by the spread of networked digital information and communications technologies. The theory of the network society has been expounded upon by a number of thinkers, most notably the sociologist Manuel Castells in his book The Rise of the Network Society. In his interpretation, the rise of networks as the dominant modality for sociopolitical organization reshapes social structures as they no longer need to be tied to physical space, but simply to networks of information and communications flow. Traditional organizational structures, based on geographical proximity and the synchronicity of time, come to increasingly exist alongside a new space of networks, where space is compressed and time becomes asynchronous, what Castells calls the space of flows and timeless time. These new organizational structures become based on the processing and exchange of information and ideas. Ideas become reified through information technology to make them something greatly more important in the immediate workings of society. The theorist Van Dijk likewise looks at how a combination of social and media networks shape society's primary modes of organization and most important structures at all levels. He compares this type of society to a mass society that is shaped by groups, organizations and communities, the circle mass, organized in physical co-presence. In a network society increasingly power shifts from a traditional form, which is defined by one's position within a hierarchy, to increasingly becoming linked to one's access to and capacity to use networks enabled by technology. As networks come to occupy, mediate and coordinate ever more spheres of social life, political organization becomes reconfigured around access or lack of access to these global networks. In his work, Emmanuel Castells argues that these networks are highly efficient because they're very effective at managing complexity and at adapting to changing conditions. Thus as our socioeconomic systems become more complex and more dynamic, the divide between those who are able to access and use these global networks, relative to those who continue within existing industrial age institutional structures, becomes greater as two parallel systems come to coexist. This in turn reshapes sociopolitical organization on the macro level. Traditional political divides move to the background as new ones emerge based on a distinction between those who have the resources to access these global networks in terms of education, cultural receptiveness and technology know-how and those who don't. We can note in passing how this divide has already fed through to disrupt traditional political dynamics as it has been expressed in the split of the American middle class into upper middle and lower middle with resulting political repercussions. In the divide in England over votes on Brexit and on a global level between nations that want to close their borders and those that want to access these global economic networks or those cultures that want to form part of the prevailing global culture and those that reject it. This change in the underlying structure of sociopolitical systems then in turn requires a recalibration of methods and models within the social sciences in order to maintain relevance. Before dealing with specific models this changing approach first requires a reconfiguration of basic assumptions. Network theory is a relational paradigm, it is looking explicitly at the relations between actors. This is in contrast to a more traditional paradigm that focuses on discrete entities, people and organizations. Most of social science, political science and policy making to date is done based upon data sets that consist solely of data about individuals and their properties. This is of course only half the picture, just as important is how those people aren't connected. We are increasingly waking up to the fact that we've been doing social science and policy making as if we were dealing with groups of people who had nothing to do with each other. In the past we put a lot of effort into building up databases about individuals but now we have an ever growing amount of relational data between people coming from social networks and other sources for free. In political and social science we tend to focus on well-defined organizations as these formal organizations are easier to identify and they limit the number of entities that we need to deal with to a level that is more easy to comprehend. However this focus on the parts of the system can work to blind us to the complexity of the real situation. Viewing things in an object-based paradigm leads to an incomplete understanding and ensuing incomplete policies guided by this insight. Most notably it leads us to focus on the centralized formal institutions of political organization but blinds us to the complexity of the multiplicity of distributed informal overlapping networks that make up any society. As information technology greatly facilitates the development of these distributed information networks they become ever more important to understanding what is going on in the system and in such a case it becomes important to switch our focus from looking primarily at the formal institutions to looking at the network of informal organizations around them. Society is just as much about who you are as with whom you are when one continues with a focus on the parts when connectivity increases then things stop making sense. The primary parameter that affects the overall workings of a network system is its density of connections. Going from low connectivity to high connectivity is a paradigm shift that induces new patterns and behavior in the overall system, new rules for survival and success. At a high cost of making and maintaining connections the network will have a low density. With a limited number of connections things are connected in a limited number of ways which makes the system relatively linear. That is to say there will typically only be one way to get from A to B. To conserve on the limited degree of overall connectivity resources and information typically have to flow to a centralized point from where they are then distributed thus creating centralized organizations and a hierarchy based upon one's proximity to the center where the massive resources are flowing through. This is the same for a transport network, a financial network or a sociopolitical network. With a limited degree of connectivity organizations can have strong boundaries and be defined by those boundaries. As the cost of transaction is high most of the organization's resources need to lie within the organization which in turn works to reinforce the dichotomy between the inside and outside and strengthen the boundary condition. In such a world it makes sense to focus one's analysis on the individual parts and their properties. Organizations that have more resources internal to their boundary will likely prevail and be able to define the overall system. As it becomes easier to make connections within the system both the number of connections proliferate but also the number of channels may also proliferate meaning that things do not just go in a linear fashion with everything flowing to the center and back outs instead things can now connect directly peer to peer. Information and resources can start to flow and connect things in a multiplicity of ways. The system becomes non-linear in that there may now be a multiplicity of ways to connect things with options as to which of these channels may be chosen. In such a world the nature of power changes substantially as power is relational and it is in one's capacity to restrict other people's possible actions to those that one desires. It is much more easily exercised in a world where there are limited possible connections where one can directly control those channels. As the number of degrees of freedom for the individual in terms of connectivity increases the centralization of power now becomes diffused out into the network. Moises Naim author of the book The End of Power knows this when he writes the ones uncontested leaders of every arena from religion to government and from military to finance are increasingly aware that they face unprecedented constraints in what they can do with the power they have. Power has become easier to get harder to use and far easier to lose. Big powers everywhere face a reckoning as insurgents fringe political parties, upstart citizen media outlets, leaderless young people in city squares and charismatic individuals who seem to have come out of nowhere shake up the old order. They are undermining and thwarting the once unquestioned mega players at every turn. Naim concludes that power as we know it is over. In the book he writes about the extent to which recent developments have made traditional sources of centralized power whether political, corporate or cultural, newly vulnerable to challenges from smaller, nimbler entities. He also warns that the decline of the superpower as an authority providing global structure is producing less stability than ever before. He believes that a situation where small actors have the power to veto but not to dictate essentially to destroy but not create is a recipe for gridlock, anarchy or both. In a world of connectivity closed organizations are rendered less effective in the face of networks that can aggregate resources on demands. In adapting to this new context traditional organizations are required to go through a process of what we call unbundling. We go from a world where everything is held within a predefined hierarchical structure and managed through formal structures to dynamic networks that work to aggregate the distributed resources within very large groups of people in the way that Facebook or WeChat do. These networks create value by connecting people who now have powerful tools of communications in their hands and a desire to create content. As resources become more widely distributed within the society it becomes about creating networks for accessing and using those resources outside of the formal organizations. Organizations that try to go on doing everything within formal structures of ownership and management start to appear cumbersome in the face of agile and dynamic networks that are able to more rapidly aggregate resources and adapt to the changing context. The most important structural transformation that takes place in this process of increasing interconnectivity is as Castell writes in his book the logic of the network is more powerful than the powers of the network. When connectivity increases it is possible to access resources external to the organization more easily thus sharing resources across the network becomes greatly more viable. The result of this is that the amount of resources that can be easily and quickly accessed on the network becomes greatly larger than what may exist within any one organization. The network as a whole becomes greater than any of its parts and those who can orchestrate networks become more powerful than those who can control any of the individual formal organizations within it. Traditional organizations come to find themselves embedded within and increasingly constrained by these global networks. The internet is a classical example of this more information can now be accessed on the internet than any organization could possibly have. This has shifted the balance of power away from these organizations that once had the information like universities governments intelligence agencies etc towards anyone who can access the network but equally it shifts it to those who can orchestrate these networks organizations like Google or WeChat that orchestrate people's access to that network are greatly more powerful in shaping people's perception than any formal closed organization none can own or control the network but those who can orchestrate it become the new superpowers network orchestrators are platforms and another term for a network society is a platform society in a network society the design of the platform organization is better able to harness the underlying structure and resources they become the dominant form of organizational mode enveloping the traditional industrial age organization today in business and economics we now understand the mechanics of why platforms become the dominant organizational modality within a network society and there are even mathematical models now for understanding this in economics sanghi Paul Chattery one of the preeminent theorists on platform organizations contrast them with the industrial age model which he calls the pipeline business model and notes that when a platform enters a pipeline firm's market the platform almost always wins which is very similar to the previous dynamic during the development of the industrial age where whenever a bureaucratic model of organization entered a new sphere of life it came to dominate societies and organizations are made up of both nonlinear distributed networks of informal organization and formal structures the formal structures emerge out of and are determinant of the informal structures although we may often only see the formal structures they are contingent upon the much more complex network of informal structures within the organization formal political institutions are defined by a set of formal relations of power in the way that a hierarchy defines a chain of commands a set of relations that defines superior and inferior actors and thus formal institutionalized structures through which power is channeled informal sociopolitical organizations though often do not have this formal power structure the resource that flows through the informal networks of civil society is instead what we call social capital social capital can be understood as the networks of relations among people within a given community through which they share common norms values and understanding that facilitates cooperation and thus enables that society to function effectively social capital is the measure of the degree of potential for cooperation within a community given such a network social network analysis thus helps us to model and identify these informal networks and how they influence political processes political systems represent the processes through which people made collective decisions and implement them the more the trust consensus and cooperation within the community network the less the need for common decisions to be imposed through formal power structures to achieve effective political organization requires both connectivity between members but also institutions built on that connectivity that enables pro-social behavior pro-social behavior is acting to the benefit of society in general the handbook of social psychology explains that pro-social behavior refers to a broad range of actions intended to benefit one or more people other than oneself pro-social behavior plays a vital role in maintaining social bonds and in making social transactions possible out of the combination of connectivity between members and pro-social behavior combined one gets something that is very valuable to a community the infrastructure for consensus and cooperation in making collective decisions and taking collective action and we can call this social capital the value that is inherent in the overall sociopolitical network of the community and which can be deployed towards enabling collective action political capital refers to the trust consensus and cooperation among members that enable them to achieve collective political decisions without their imposition through formal political structures thus in looking at the political system of any given community we need to identify the formal and informal structures the formal structures will be most manifest to us but they will only give us a limited degree of insight into the system's overall workings and often the manifest institutions of a society are simply those institutions that the society wants you to see and thus they can often be misleading to gain a full understanding it requires that one look at the informal networks of connections the central factor here being the degree of integrity to the network and the degree of pro-social behavior thus the overall amount of social capital that is flowing through the system for example the single best predictor of crime within a neighborhood in the us is how many of the people in the community know each other in the absence of people knowing each other and thus looking out for each other we will likely have to impose formal authoritative structures to police the community we may well then praise ourselves for how well the police force does but we would of course be doing better if they were not needed in the first place when the network has integrity and there are resources flowing through it that incentivizes people to form part of it and contributes to the network likewise having a functional network makes it then possible for people to build solutions on top of that network by tapping into its resources instead of everyone having to reinvent the wheel each time they want to create a social organization or achieve some collective project just as with the rise of the internet as we can now build organizations based on that network that harness the common resources available the same is true for social political and economic organizations for example now that we've built these global supply chains cities and countries like dubai and china can build solutions on top of them tapping into the flow of resources by performing a required process whether that's manufacturing or financial services the same is true for functioning social networks once people within the community are connected via information technology and there is a limited degree of social capital one can build solutions on top of this like apps for people to report graffiti in potholes to make local decisions they care about etc in such a case the emphasis shifts from the formal political structures of control and management and the provisioning of discrete public services to the integrity of the social network and fostering the flow of social capital that is available on the network so that people can build their own solutions on it