Issue spaces as semantic and social networks: Does what you know determine who you know
and vice versa?
Lindsay E. Young, Sneha Narayan, and Noshir Contractor
In a complex and crowded public sphere, we need a better understanding of the mechanisms that
structure social issues and allow them to thrive within the competitive issue ecology. Unlike
collaborative spaces that exist within the boundaries of a field or industry, an issue space is
comprised of actors from a variety of contexts brought together by a common interest in the focal
issue. This makes patterns in actors’ conceptions of the issue an important factor to account for
when identifying processes underlying their social interactions. Therefore, we seek to determine
the extent to which shared interpretations of an issue motivate collaborations amongst members
of an issue space.
To this end, we examine a population of professionals working in the gender and sustainability
issue space. Drawing from actors’ responses to an open-ended survey question about their
interpretation of this space, we use centering resonance analysis to capture the semantic
similarities between actors. Then, using p*/ERGM techniques, we estimate the effect of
semantic similarity on the collaborative structure of the issue space.
Examining the relationship between semantic and social dimensions of an issue space shows
how actors’ interpretations of the issue affect their strategic interactions to advance the issue.
More broadly, delineating these two dimensions reveals an issue as being constituted by
discourse and social interaction. In particular, the degree to which the semantic and social
relationships within an issue space reinforce one another has implications for how the meaning
of an issue is controlled and managed in the public sphere.