The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

5.5. The Structural Perspective

The structural perspective analyzes the association, arrangement, proximity, or connection between resources without primary concern for their meaning or the origin of these relationships.286[Com] We take a structural perspective when we define a family as “a collection of people” or when we say that a particular family like the Simpsons has five members. Sometimes all we know is that two resources are connected, as when we see a highlighted word or phrase that is pointing from the current web page to another. At other times we might know more about the reasons for the relationships within a set of resources, but we still focus on their structure, essentially merging or blurring all of the reasons for the associations into a single generic notion that the resources are connected.

[286][Com] Of the five perspectives on relationships in this chapter, the structural one comes closest to the meaning of “relation” in mathematics and computer science, where a relation is a set of ordered elements (“tuples”) of equal degree (§5.6.1, “Degree”). A binary relation is a set of element pairs, a ternary relation is a set of 3-tuples, and so on. The elements in each tuple are “related” but they do not need to have any “significant association” or “relationship” among them.

Travers and Milgram conducted a now-famous study in the 1960s involving the delivery of written messages between people in the midwestern and eastern United States. ...