As an Africanist trained in Cape Town and Oxford, I had been taught that in the field my initial task should be to search for corporate social groups, the agnatic lineage segment being the prime exemplar. I had found this advice of only limited value when working among the Ngoni of what is now Zambia, for their kinship system, though heavily coloured by agnatic ideology, was in practice what I called ‘omnidirectional’ (Barnes 195if: 125-6) and lacked any corporate groupings above the level of the domestic family. When a few years later I began working in Norway, I thought that the lesser salience of a kinship system in an industrialized society, and the greater salience of an institutionalized legal system would restore importance to my teachers' advice. I was mistaken, for I had overlooked the large place occupied in the social life of western Norway, as in all industrialized societies, by the relations of friendship and the categories of social class, neither of which generate corporate groups.

In the paper I proposed the use of the notion of social network to describe and analyse systems of relations which do not necessarily cluster into clearly delimited groups. I also drew attention to a distinctive pattern of leadership and decision-taking found on the island where I worked, reminiscent of the Duke of Plaza-Toro, who ‘led his army from behind, he found it less exciting'. The study of social networks is now well established as a specialization within sociology and social anthropology (cf. Wellman 1983) but ‘leadership from behind’ still awaits more professional scrutiny (Barnes 1987b). […]