ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the main analyses of social networks in the modern world: the community studies and the social capital approach, social network analysis, and the small worlds approach. Then it argues for a mobilities approach that understands social networks as mobile and performed, having to be practised to be meaningful and durable. This mobilities approach argues that extensive regional, national and transitional flows and meetings of objects, technologies, representations and people produce small worlds. The chapter argues that much social scientific mobility research works with the notion of autonomous, free-floating individuals and thereby overlooks the relational economies of commitments and obligations to family members, partners and friends that connect people and their networks. It also examines Social Network Analysis (SNA) through the extensive research programme of Wellman and collaborators at Toronto. SNA is concerned with mapping the links between people, organizations, interest groups, places.
