We shall thanks to Dr. Ricardo Mansilla, to the INTER DISCIPLINA magazine’s prestigious team and to the Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en Ciencias y Humanidades (CEIICH), for the invitation to collaborate in the social structure dossier. Nowadays, we think that the structural perspective was relegated in order to explain the main problems in the social science field. Beyond the reasons, we think that the bulk of the researchers in the Latin-American social science had leaved this perspective behind. They abandoned the structural point of view to explain important issues, like labour market phenomena, educational processes, about evolution and determination of inequality and poverty, among others. In this framework, we want to working in a dossier with these structural points of views into the present INTER DISCIPLINA’s number.

Related to the articles that are included in this number, despite the diversity of their methodology and themes, all of them point out clearly structural phenomena of our societies: the social and productive structure, the work insertion, the education, the vocational training, human rights related to the fragility of democratic system and, besides, the social network analysis as a useful tool for characterize structural problems.

Thus, we are interested in remark the importance of two dimensions that are developed in all articles included. On the one hand, the structural problems linked to the labour market problems; on the other hand, the importance of the methodology and the network perspective for the analysis of the social and productive structure.

To watch the many edges of labour market phenomena from the structural point of view has a special importance, because allows us understand processes that, at least in the last forty years, they became deeper in the Latin American region. We refer to the raising structural heterogeneity into the different labour markets. This problem we could directly see in the strong differences in how is the work insertion of the millions of Latin-American workers. This kind of phenomena can’t be approached accurately if we do not use a structural framework because, as usual, we’ll do a recursive or circular explanation of them.

Masello’s article points out this theme through the structural insertion of the employments as a way to identify differences into a same observable indicator. Moreover, Granovsky analyzes the technological change and its impact into the employment and says that this relation could have several shapes: not necessarily must destroy jobs, it depends of the structural characteristics of the society.

In account to networks methodology, we could mention, at least, three observations. Firstly, is important to remark the aggregate value that means for the social sciences, to count with a such tool, that allows carry on quantitative analysis about different structures of relations (e. g., strength, frequency, centrality, among others). In Oliva and Chuchco’s article, we can see a social network analysis that builds several measures for concepts that they have been used in the social sciences historically, as hierarchy, cohesion, power, fragmentation, and so forth).

Secondly, there is a significant benefit because we can include several levels into a same network analysis. This allows connecting two or more levels different from each other, where one of this could be the social structure level. Besides, network methodology does combine the traditional attributive analysis, which has been used a lot by the classical methodology. For example, in the Caridi’s work, it is deduced a relations structure from a set of attributive information (geographic, politic, temporal, etc.) of its objects of study. All of this, enable to conclude in a different paths related to the kidnaped people for the last Argentinian dictatorship.

Finally, it is extremely relevant to remark that this network methodology, like many other, had experienced a very large advance in the las twenty or twenty five years through science of computation’s advance. These sciences became in a remarkable solutions supplier for the complexity that implies the social sciences problems. As these social problems are multi-caused the computational models are better in comparison with the traditional mathematical or statistical models. Then, these computational models can represent an important achieve to the social science practice.

We do hope that the articles will be important to you and stimulate new debates.

Best regards.