Internal Structures

Examples of Internal Structures in the following topics:

• Continuity Theory

  • The theory considers the internal structures and external structures of continuity to describe how people adapt to their circumstances and set their goals.
  • The internal structure of an individual - for instance, an individual's personality traits - remains relatively constant throughout a person's lifetime.
  • This internal structure facilitates future decision-making by providing the individual with a strong internal foundation of the past.
  • The external structure of an individual consists of relationships and social roles, and it supports the maintenance of a stable self-concept and lifestyle.
  • " He continued to expound upon the theory over the years, explaining the development of internal and external structures in 1989 and publishing a book in 1999 called Continuity and Adaptation in Aging: Creating Positive Experiences.

• Informal Structure

  • For example, a college management class of 50 students may contain several informal groups that constitute the informal organization within the formal structure of the class.
  • The informal organization is the interlocking social structure that governs how people work together in practice.
  • Keith Davis suggests that informal groups serve at least four major functions within the formal organizational structure.
  • Internal control persuades members of the group to conform to its lifestyle.
  • Explain the function of informal groups within a formal organizational structure

• Analyzing Data and Drawing Conclusions

  • Predictive analytics focuses on the application of statistical or structural models for predictive forecasting or classification.
  • Text analytics applies statistical, linguistic, and structural techniques to extract and classify information from textual sources, a species of unstructured data.
  • Internal validity is an inductive estimate of the degree to which conclusions about causal relationships can be made (e.g., cause and effect), based on the measures used, the research setting, and the whole research design.

• Summary

  • This chapter and the next are concerned with the ways in which networks display "structure" or deviation from random connection.
  • In the current chapter, we've approached the same issue of structuring from the "top-down" by looking at patterns of macro-structure in which individuals are embedded in non-random ways.
  • The tools in the current chapter provide some ways of examining the "texture" of the structuring of the whole population.
  • In the next chapter we will focus on the same issue of connection and structure from the "bottom-up. " That is, we'll look at structure from the point of view of the individual "ego."
  • Taken together, the approaches in chapters 8 and 9 illustrate, again, the "duality" of social structure in which individuals make social structures, but do so within a matrix of constraints and opportunities imposed by larger patterns.

• Structural equivalence

  • Structural equivalence is easy to grasp (though it can be operationalized in a number of ways) because it is very specific: two actors must be exactly substitutable in order to be structurally equivalent.
  • In figure 12.1 there are seven "structural equivalence classes."
  • E and F, however, fall in the same structural equivalence class.
  • Finally, actors H and I fall in the same structural equivalence class.
  • Actors that are structurally equivalent are in identical "positions" in the structure of the diagram.

• Formal Structure

  • Formal structure of an organization or group includes a fixed set of rules for intra-organization procedures and structures.
  • The formal structure of a group or organization includes a fixed set of rules of procedures and structures, usually set out in writing, with a language of rules that ostensibly leave little discretion for interpretation.
  • When attempting to create a formal structure for an organization, it is necessary to recognize informal organization in order to create workable structures.
  • Tended effectively, the informal organization complements the more explicit structures, plans, and processes of the formal organization.
  • A formal organization is a fixed set of rules of intra-organization procedures and structures.

• Summary

  • The kind of equivalence expressed by the notion of automorphism falls between structural and regular equivalence, in a sense.
  • Structural equivalence means that individual actors can be substituted one for another.
  • Automorphic equivalence means that sub-structures of graphs can can be substituted for one another.
  • The notion of structural equivalence corresponds well to analyses focusing on how individuals are embedded in networks -- or network positional analysis.
  • Still, the search for multiple substitutable sub-structures in graphs (particularly in large and complicated ones) may reveal that the complexity of very large structures is more apparent than real; sometimes very large structures are decomposable (or partially so) into multiple similar smaller ones.

• Sanctions

  • Internal controls are a form of social control that we impose on ourselves.

• Income Distribution

  • Department of Commerce, Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have found that the distribution of income in the United States has become increasingly unequal since the 1970s.

• Summary

  • Structural equivalence is the most "concrete" form of equivalence.
  • Two actors are exactly structurally equivalent if they have exactly the same ties to exactly the same other individual actors.
  • Pure structural equivalence can be quite rare in social relations, but approximations to it may not be so rare.
  • Commonly we would say that two actors who are approximately structural equivalent are in approximately the same position in a structure.
  • Two actors may not be tied to the same others, but if they are embedded in the same way in the larger structure, they are equivalent.