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The aim of this paper is to adumbrate methods more suitable to a posthuman social science, so as to better attend to the digital datafication of life. Five core functions of research method are presented. The first three - the desire for origins, the need to exclude, and the establishment of a regime of labour - often reinstate social orders and hierarchies, and heavily control if not curtail knowledge production. The fourth function opens onto new ontologies of the social, when methods emerge out of transformative historical moments, and data floods and then overturns the old methods. The fifth underscores how new research methods are innovative if they engage with time or temporality in new ways, queering the temporal logic of old methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter I review empirical studies directly testing the hypotheses of my 1973 paper "The Strength of Weak Ties" (hereafter "SWT") and work that elaborates those hypotheses theoretically or uses them to suggest new empirical research not discussed in my original formulation. A long the way, I will reconsider various aspects of the theoretical argument, attempt to plug some holes, and broaden its base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the November 1988 issue of "Contemporary Sociology," part of a review of "Knowledge and Society," was devoted to the author's contribution to that volume, "Stouffer and Lazarsfeld: Patterns of Influence." Although this part took only eleven lines, it managed within that space to make a number of factual errors of description, some by commission and some by omission. The author takes the opportunity to correct these. The reviewer says he raises an "admittedly small" question, as though this were true of the whole paper. It actually applies only to its first main subsection. According to the reviewer the initial question was about the influence on "empirical research," it was explicitly confined to the survey. The question, about the relative influence is treated as the whole subject of the paper, although its introduction refers to this as an example, to be used in a discussion of how academic influence operates. The data are described (only) as citations from journals, although other sources were also used.