We live in a world that is paradoxically small and vast: each of us is embedded in local communities and yet we are only a few 'links' away from anyone else in the world.

This engaging book represents these interdependencies' positive and negative consequences, their multiple effects and the ways in which a local occurrence in one part of the world can directly affect the rest. Then it demonstrates precisely how these interactions and relationships form.

This is a book for the social network novice on learning how to study, think about and analyse social networks; the intermediate...