This essay raises more questions than it answers. In first draft, which we have only moderately revised, it was written about two decades ago and has been circulating in manuscript since then. (References to recent literature have, however, been added.! It was not published previously because we raised so many questions that we did not know how to answer; we hoped to eventually solve the problems and publish. The time has come to cut bait. With the publication of a new journal of human network studies, we offer our initial soundings and unsolved questions to the community of researchers which is now forming in this field. While a great deal of work has been done on some of these questions during the past 20 years, we do not feel that the basic problems have been adequately resolved.