Wednesday, July 12, 2017
Anatomy - Large LT (University of Glasgow)
In the sociology of Europe, the social space “Europe” is typically either equated with the European Union or defined geographically (all countries located on the European continent). However, seen from a transactionalist perspective, some European countries maintain frequent cross-border interactions and exchange with non-European countries (Delhey et al, 2014; Deutschmann, under review), calling into question how closely Europe, socially defined, maps on Europe, politically or geographically defined. Still, extensive investigations which scrutinize the social boundaries of Europe are missing.
The purpose of our paper is to close this gap and to investigate the social contours of Europe from a macro-sociological social network perspective. We use a powerful tool of network analysis, community detection algorithms, which we apply to different types of cross-border communication and mobility for more than 35 000 dyads stemming from 200 countries worldwide. These algorithms present us with the social space of transnational human interactions of Europeans, revealing major differences to “political” or “geographic” definitions of Europe.
