Peer Reviewed Articles
Shaw, L. 2021. On Rupture: Establishing the Cognitive Bases of Social Change. Sociological Forum. (Special Issue on “Culture and Cognition: New Approaches and New Applications.”)
Small, Christopher T.; Bjorkegren, Michael; Erkkilä, Timo; Shaw, Lynette and Megill, Colin. 2021. Polis: Scaling Deliberation by Mapping High Dimensional Opinion Spaces. Recerca. (Special Issue on “Democracy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence“).
Shaw, L. 2021. The Inevitable Sociality of Money: the Primacy of Practical Affirmation over Conceptual Consensus in the Construction of Bitcoin’s Value. Socio-Economic Review.
Shaw, L. 2015. Mechanics and dynamics of social construction: Modeling the emergence of culture from individual mental representation. Poetics. 52:75-90
Stovel, K. and Shaw, L. 2012. Brokerage. Annual Review of Sociology. 38:7.1-7.20
Published Conference Proceedings
Shaw, L. 2019. “Social Valuation Dynamics for the Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Era.” In Morales, A. (Ed.), IX International Conference on Complex Systems, STEM Academic Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 32 – 43.
Book Chapters
Manuscripts in Preparation
Shaw, L., Cesare, N. and Esposito, M. From Meaning to Behavior: Mental Representation, the Patterning of Social Life, and Cultural Analysis. Presented at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, 2015.
This paper looks at the relationship between mental representation processes and the emergence of profiles of human action and statement that are detectable via methods currently favored “big data” analyses. In particular, this paper begins with the role of mental networks of association in shaping not only humans’ sense-making in situations but also in generating their repertories of observable behaviors. After delimiting the basic mechanics of this process, this work then considers the implications of it for classic sociological issues of polysemy, socially shared (i.e. collective) vs. idiosyncratic representations, and representational/cultural change. The paper then uses the examples of cluster analysis, multiple correspondence and principle component analysis, and topic modeling to consider how this link between behavior and mental representations can systematically increase the analytical leverage of our existing approaches to the empirical study of culture. In the final section, the paper then offers a demonstration of how this perspective can be used to motivate and guide a “data mining for culture” approach via the example of using Yelp reviews to identify shared patterns of consumption and speech in large-scale social data.
Shaw, L. What is Bitcoin? Imaginative Control and the Realities of Innovating within Capitalist Markets. (2018)
Abstract
In less than a decade, Bitcoin has gone from being the monetary experiment of a small group of “Techno-Libertarians” to becoming the basis of new multibillion (USD) financial technology and digital asset sectors dominated by the many of the same institutions and actors it was initially intended to subvert. Building upon recent work by Beckert (2017) that has centered the role of “imagined futures” in economic action, this article argues that this developmental trajectory is a natural outcome of innovation in capitalist markets, one that arises from such systems’ inherent bias toward realizing the frameworks of interpretation and valuation possessed by those who are best positioned in the existing order to direct the flow of investment resources. Leveraging the strong conformance to free market ideals that characterized cryptocurrency’s conception and development, this work draws upon an original collection of sources documenting the history of cryptocurrency’s development, automated content analysis of over 7,500 media reports between 2011 through early 2016, and longitudinal trends in venture capital funding over the same time period to demonstrate how this emergent form of imaginative control plays out in real capitalist markets and the impacts this dynamic has on bounding the space of products and solutions that are likely to arise from innovation within capitalist markets.
Lynette A. Shaw, Ph.D. 