structural cohesion#cite note-1

{{Short description|Lowest number of people removed to disconnect a social group}}

{{technical|date=August 2016}}

In sociology, structural cohesion is the conception

{{cite journal

|last = N

|first = T

|author2 = White, Douglas

|authorlink2 = Douglas R. White

|title = Structural Cohesion and Embeddedness: A Hierarchical Concept of Social Groups.

|journal = American Sociological Review

|volume = 68

|issue = 1

|pages = 1–25

|year = 2003

|url = http://www2.asanet.org/journals/ASRFeb03MoodyWhite.pdf

|access-date = 2006-08-19

|doi = 10.2307/3088904

|url-status = dead

|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20060927142539/http://www2.asanet.org/journals/ASRFeb03MoodyWhite.pdf

|archive-date = 2006-09-27

|jstor = 3088904

}}

{{cite journal

| last = White

| first = Douglas

| authorlink = Douglas R. White

|author2=Frank Harary

| title = The Cohesiveness of Blocks in Social Networks: Node Connectivity and Conditional Density.

| journal = Sociological Methodology

| volume = 31

| issue = 1

| pages = 305–359

| year = 2001

| url = http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/sm-w23.PDF

| format = book

| id =

| access-date = 2012-08-13

| doi = 10.1111/0081-1750.00098 | citeseerx = 10.1.1.304.3296

| s2cid = 15806800

| author2-link = Frank Harary

}} of a useful formal definition and measure of cohesion in social groups. It is defined as the minimal number of actors in a social network that need to be removed to disconnect the group. It is thus identical to the question of the node connectivity of a given graph in discrete mathematics. The vertex-cut version of Menger's theorem also proves that the disconnection number is equivalent to a maximally sized group with a network in which every pair of persons has at least this number of separate paths between them. It is also useful to know that {{mvar|k}}-cohesive graphs (or {{mvar|k}}-components) are always a subgraph of a k-core, although a {{mvar|k}}-core is not always {{mvar|k}}-cohesive. A {{mvar|k}}-core is simply a subgraph in which all nodes have at least {{mvar|k}} neighbors but it need not even be connected.

The boundaries of structural endogamy in a kinship group are a special case of structural cohesion.