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The development of a technical system or network can be broken down schematically into seven phases: birth, in the context of complementary, in which there is usually a preexisting network; initial development, during which appears competition among networks; transformation, during which the uses of the network change; redevelopment, which usually implies extensive or intensive growth of the network; maturity; decline and eventually, disappearance, taking into account the birth of new networks. This approach, through technical mutations, attempts to clarity an exogenous vision of the changes involved, giving more importance to interferences between the network and its environment, and a taking into account of the specificities of long term endogenous transformations of networks.

Recent analyses of current transformations of productive organization have stressed the increasing role played by non-market relationships (and this does not imply a weakening of competition and a decrease in market relationships - the contrary would appear to hold) and other social relationships, which are not reducible to mere institutional and organizational dimensions. Accounting for these new dimensions, which participate in productive organization (in the broad sense), is nonetheless often carried out in a reductive mode, narrowly associating social and spatial proximity, and at the same time, designating territorial integration as the new, orthodox spatial form of productive organization. This article reviews these various analyses and attempts to demonstrate how relying on the notion of "social networks" makes it possible to better take into account the new social and spatial dimensions of productive organization.

The concept of network which underlying the study of modes of informal sociability may be defined as a configuration of social relationships. There is a relationship between two individuals when the existence or the activity of one exerts an influence upon the behavior or frame of mind of the other. The relationship can be qualified as social when indi viduals other than those in direct interaction intervene in the relationship and contribute to determining its modalities. Configurations of relationships are chains of relationships linked by common terms. From the point of view of social dynamics, the common terms possess a particular type of significance. The notion of network thus conceived lends itself to for- malization or to visualization through diagrams, but this does not constitute an indispensable condition for analysis. Usually, one must differentiate between personal or egocentric networks, which are described starting from an individual taken as the center of the analysis or as source of information, and social or contextual networks, situated within a previously-defined context (kinship, building, neighborhood, institution, organization, etc.). Starting with the individual taken as the term of reference, it is possible to distinguish the different zones of interaction, depending upon whether the relationships are direct or mediated by a common term. The examination of the characteristics in the relationships thus found, as well as the formal aspects of the configurations within which they are situated, makes it possible to draw conclusions concerning the typical modes of sociability for a given social environment.

It is not possible to confuse the notion of "territory" with that of "locale" for the simple reason that a territory is not only the place where identities are produced, but also that in which otherness is developed. It is not only the place where one "dwells," but also the place through which one moves. Thus, while territory is above all an anthropological notion, which cannot be simplified to the merely local, this is so because this notion makes it possible to think, in the same space of reflection, that which, from a certain point of view, might appear as incompatible: on the one hand, the land, the earth, the locality - that is to say, that which certain individuals now claim, as in ex- Yugoslavia, as the prerogative of the "natives" (but who are the natives?), and the unique vector of identiry; and on the other, the question of foreign-ness, of otherness, of the third party, of margins. If thus the real or mythical immigrant takes an active part in his own history, and in ours, in his own space and in ours, the only solution really possible is to take into account the otherness which exists within us all.