Generalized Blockmodeling (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences)

After establishing its mathematical foundations, this integrated study of blockmodeling, the most frequently used technique in social network analysis, generalizes blockmodeling for the examination of many network structures. It also includes a broad introduction to cluster analysis. The authors propose direct optimizational approaches to blockmodeling which yield blockmodels that best fit the data, and create the potential for many generalizations and a deductive use of blockmodeling.