Sociology of Diffusion

Catalog description

Diffusion - the spread of social practices - is of central interest for the way it combines attention to social structure and social change. The course reviews theory and method in both classic and contemporary diffusion studies. Theoretical perspectives include choice-theoretic ideas about the gains to mimicry under uncertainty, network analysis of the relational structures that facilitate diffusion, and institutional accounts of the way actors interpret and normalize social practices. Methodological approaches include analysis of the distribution of adoption times, event history models of individual adoption, spatial correlation, simulation, and process tracing. Discussion of statistical methods is introduced with a focus on concepts, and is designed to be accessible to doctoral students regardless of prior coursework in multivariate data analysis.