2025-2026 Webcast Lecture Series

Abstract

A small, but growing body of network research, treats structural features such as reciprocity, transitivity, and degree heterogeneity as self-organizing, endogenous mechanisms inherent to social networks. I identify a coherent if largely implicit perspective I term the Emergent Endogenous Self-Organizing Perspective (EESOP). I argue that EESOP conflates three distinct senses of endogeneity (statistical, structural, and dynamic), misattributes the property of self-organization (which more properly applies to emergent macro patterns than to the micro-level tendencies that produce them), and treats networks as sui generis entities with their own inherent properties and laws — a position difficult to sustain given that networks are analytical constructs whose boundaries and content are defined by the researcher. The perspective is reminiscent of the orthogenesis movement in evolutionary biology, in which species are seen as having an intrinsic evolutionary momentum independent of exogenous forces. I also note the role of semantic transitive closure in amplifying these conceptual slippages across the literature. The paper concludes with observations on how the rhetorical appeal of complex terminology contributes to theoretical imprecision in the field.