ABSTRACT
At the end of the previous chapter we questioned the simple division of ‘nodes’ and ‘links’, as it was evident that some of the positions that ‘nodes’ have in a network are identified by their function – what they do in the network. If we take the map of any LHTL respondent and ask them to talk about the people or other elements with which they link, it is unlikely that they would want to respond only along the dimensions in the questions Palonen et al. (2004) posed (‘To whom do you go to ask for advice?’ etc.). If respondents were talking about brokers or experts, they would want to describe their relationship with each of them in different ways (as our evidence showed in Chapter 5). Even if a social network analysis (SNA) researcher is focused on a specific issue of collaboration, reducing relationships to a limited set of dimensions raises questions in our minds about the validity of the representation. We shall argue in this chapter that links cannot be seen as simple representations of the type used by SNA. We will go further and argue that links are better seen as encapsulating processes, especially in the context of knowledge creation and sharing by teachers. In this chapter our focus is on Mitchell’s (1974) ‘transactional perspective’, which in some views of networks considers behaviour in terms of how an actor manipulates links. Actornetwork theorists would go even further in the transactional perspective by defining actors in terms of the process of transformation, with a ‘meaning’ being the substance of that transformation (Latour’s mediators as actors; Chapter 2). Meaning-making is at the heart of the process of learning, which, we argued in Chapter 3, is the most productive way to understand knowledge creation and sharing. Such a process is more than a relationship, indeed more than an interaction; rather, we argue that it should be seen as a transaction. This anticipates to some extent the discussion in the next chapter, but first we need to establish that links are indeed processes.
