I agree completely with your critique of the way this term is commonly used. I think the erroneous assumption that self-organization is an explanation may account for the seemingly endless numbers of case studies that are merely descriptive and lack analysis or interpretation.

I continue to be surprised though, because I would think many people studying networks would have heard about cellular automata (N. Katherine Hayles talks about them fairly often, for example) which can be give a few simple rules in order to generate patterns.

Best,
Kim