ABSTRACT
These terms have become something like an operative syntax for our times, inserted into a variety of social, cultural and organizational network theories and used to redefi ne contemporary understandings of everything from personal identity to cultural globalization to corporate restructuring. Terms such as network, then, do not just describe and explain things; they establish and shape the ways in which it is possible to think about them. Things and thinking are, in this sense, inseparable, indistinguishable from one another. The proliferation of network-based ideas in all sorts of places, including policy, economics, urban planning, the mass media, businesses, public sector reform, and a myriad of other places, though intensely contested by other researchers, is evidence of the circulation of a certain style of thought which seems increasingly taken for granted, common-sense – just everyday thought.
