POLITICS VERSUS SCIENCE: APPORTIONING ... - Buffalo State

centrally-located scientists in one research center disseminate this information to
centrally-located scientists at other research centers. The attempt to identify the
characteristics of key scientists soon intersected with research on opinion leaders.
Working on a different front, scholars (for political scientists, famously Lazarsfeld) have
attempted to profile and identify opinion leaders. Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955, 1) in their
early studies of opinion leadership wrote that it is “casually exercised, sometimes
unwitting and unbeknown…” Nevertheless, in the past 50 years scholars have made gains
in understanding opinion leadership.
There are two different types of leaders: innovator-leader and mediator-leader.
Each has a different role to play in diffusing innovations in the organization (the former)
and binding members together in a community (the latter). Leaders occupy linkage
points between the different key areas of the network. Granovetter (1973) opened up a
new line of inquiry when he suggested that weak ties played a critical bridging role in
social networks. Members of cliques are not good sources of outside information
because of the close nature of its participants: everyone knows what everyone else
knows. Members, through weak ties to other cliques, bring in new information to their
cliques. Key scientists communicate across cliques. In Weimann’s (1994: 203-204)
review of the social constructivist approach to scientific communities, he concludes that:
“The accumulating findings from numerous studies in various scientific areas indicated
clearly the presence of a social circles and invisible colleges."
We need only ask the same questions of the food policy regime that social
network theorists routinely pose: “Does the Small-World Phenomenon arise at some
point in the transition from order to disorder, and if so, what is responsible for it?” and
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