Duality@50: Making progress and looking forward
Fifty years after its publication, The Duality of Persons and Groups continues to excite the imagination of sociologists and other social scientists. Duality@50 advances research on duality building on Ronald Breiger’s foundational contribution.
Date: 14-18 April 2024
Place: Hotel and Congress Center external pageMonte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland
Conference description
The main objective of the conference was to take stock, interpret, and advance the results produced by the past fifty years of research building on the analytical concept of duality, which was first derived by Ronald Breiger in a seminal paper on the "Duality of Persons and Groups" (1974). As Breiger put it:
"Individuals come together (or, metaphorically, 'intersect' one another) within groups, which are collectivities based on the shared interests, personal affinities, or ascribed status of members who participate regularly in collective activities. At the same time, the particular patterning of an individual's affiliations (or the 'intersection' of groups within the person) defines his points of reference and (at least partially) determines his individuality" (p. 181).
This notion of duality of individuals in groups has strong – and clearly recognized - theoretical roots in the work of Georg Simmel (1908), and more specifically his discussion of "The Intersection of Social Circles" (Die Kreuzung sozialer Kreise).
Program
The conference program consisted of three full days (April 15-17, 2024), with a social welcome dinner the day before and a farewell breakfast and closing lecture the day after. The conference schedule included presentations and discussions, but left plenty of time for informal interactions during the day and in the evening.
People
Main Guest
Prof. Ron Breiger, The University of Arizona
Ronald Breiger is a Regents Professor and Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona. A graduate of Brandeis University (A.B. 1970) and Harvard University (PhD 1975), he is a recipient of the Simmel Award (INSNA) and the J.S. Coleman and P.F. Lazarsfeld distinguished career awards of (respectively) the ASA Mathematical Sociology and Methodology Sections.
Invited Speakers and Discussants
Prof. Omar Lizardo is a professor in Sociology at UCLA and does research at the intersection of cultural sociology, historical sociology, social movement studies, cognitive sociology, and network science.
Prof. John Levi Martin is the Florence Borchert Bartling Professor at the University of Chicago at Chicago, where he enjoys teaching classical theory and (according to his website) writing about himself in the third person.
Prof. Sophie Mützel is a Professor of Sociology, Media, and Networks at the Department of Sociology, University of Lucerne, Switzerland. She currently serves as Chair of the Department of Sociology and directs the MA program Media and Networks.
Prof. Philippa E. Pattison is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne. Previously, she served as the Deputy Vice-Chancellor Education at the University of Sydney.
Prof. Tom A.B. Snijders is an Emeritus Professor of Methodology and Statistics in the Department of Sociology of the Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Groningen, and at the University of Oxford he is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Social Sciences, emeritus fellow of Nuffield College, and an associate member of the Department of Statistics.
Prof. Robin Wagner-Pacifici is an Emeritus Professor affiliated with the Department of Sociology at The New School for Social Research. She is the author of a number of books, most recently What is an Event? (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and The Art of Surrender: Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict’s End.
Organizers
Prof. Ulrik Brandes
Ulrik Brandes is Professor for Social Networks in the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences at ETH Zurich. His background is in algorithmics, with special interests in graph algorithms and network visualization. He is an editor of Social Networks.
Prof. Alessandro Lomi
Alessandro Lomi is a professor at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano, where he directs the Social Network Analysis Research (external pageSoNAR) Center. Until recently he was a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Exeter (UK) and a member of Division One of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He serves as an associate editor at the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series A). He is a life member of Clare Hall College, University of Cambridge (UK).
Prof. Christoph Stadtfeld
Christoph Stadtfeld is Associate Professor of Social Networks at ETH Zurich. His research addresses questions about the dynamics of social networks, combing a sociological perspective with statistical and computational approaches. He serves as action editor for Network Science.
Natalie Peyer
Natalie Peyer is the office manager of the Social Networks Lab, ETH Zurich.
Venue
external pageMonte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland
Monte Verità rises on the hills above Ascona and Lake Maggiore, and has always been a magnetic pole of convergence of ideas, trends, experiments and historical figures.
The alternative and vegetarian colony of the early twentieth century marked the birth of the myth of Monte Verità, with the presence of artists, anarchists, philosophers and thinkers, as well as illustrious guests including Hermann Hesse. After a brief period in the early twenties, in which some expressionist artists created a small art centre, the Ascona hill was bought by the banker and German art collector Baron Eduard von der Heydt. Monte Verità became a modern hotel centre which welcomed great personalities from the artistic, political and cultural worlds.
After the Baron's legacy to the Canton of Ticino in the 1950s, it was transformed into a seminar centre at the end of the 1980s, thanks to collaboration with ETH Zurich. Today, Monte Verità is a state-of-the-art congress and cultural center run by the Foundation of the same name. Immersed in the quiet and green of a park of more than 7 hectares, with an incomparable view of Lake Maggiore, it offers visitors a unique experience.
Logistics
Address venue
Fondazione Monte Verità, Strada Collina 84, 6612 Ascona, Switzerland (closest railway station: Locarno)
Contact
The conference was organized by the Social Networks Lab, ETH Zurich and Università della Svizzera italiana. For further information please contact Natalie Peyer at
