use twitter, make money fa$t

My colleague at Indiana University, Johan Bollen has patented an algorithm that allows him to link Twitter traffic to stock price fluctuations. Click on the link for the TV news item. A clip from the report:

An IU professor and researcher just received a patent for software that crunches hundreds of millions of tweets, to predict where the stock market is headed…

Think of this way: The thoughts of two or three million people probably don’t add up to much, but if you multiply that by tens or hundreds of millions of people, then you may have something.

“We find that when people get more anxious, then there is a great likelihood of the market dropping 3-4 days later and vice versa,” Bollen said.

Definitely check it out.

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it’s official – facebook is a waste of time

Recent research has shown a change in Facebook use. While users tend to retain accounts, people are now reducing their use of the website. The reasons? From a recent NY Times survey of Facebook users:

The main reasons for their social media sabbaticals were not having enough time to dedicate to pruning their profiles, an overall decrease in their interest in the site, and the general sentiment that Facebook was a major waste of time.

This may indicate that we’ve hit “peak Facebook,” in terms of the site’s popularity level. It’s now a standard tool for networking, but the novelty has worn off. People don’t feel the obligation to use it. Now, the main users will be people who really enjoy networking – young people, businesses/orgs and extroverted people. Still, a huge market, but far short of the all encompassing vision of some. Probably the time to dig deep into that “platform” strategy we were talking about.

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emergence of organizations and markets, part I by padgett & powell

A guest post by John Padgett and Woody Powell about their new book The Emergence of Organizations and Markets:

Innovation in the sense of product design is a popular research topic today, because there is a lot of money in that. Innovation, however, in the deeper sense of new actors—new types of people, new organizational forms—is not even much on the research radar screen of contemporary social scientists, even though “speciation” (to use the biologists’ term for this) lies at the heart of historical change over the longue durée, both in biological evolution and in human history. Social science—meaning mostly economics, political science and sociology—is very good at understanding selection, both at the micro level of individual choice and at the macro level of institutional regulation and lock-in. But novelty, especially of actors but also of alternatives, has first to enter from off the stage of our collective imaginary for our existing theories to be able to go to work. Our analytical shears for trimming are sharp, but the life forces that push up novelty to be trimmed tend to escape our attention, much less our understanding. If this book accomplishes anything, we at least hope to put the research topic of speciation—the emergence of new organizational forms and people—on our collective agenda.

february guest bloggers: john padgett and woody powell

It is my pleasure to announce our February guest bloggers: Woody Powell and John Padgett. Professor Powell is Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science and Engineering, Communication, and Public Policy at Stanford University. Professor Padgett is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.

Woody and John are both leading figures in the study of organizations and networks. Professor Powell is co-author, with Paul DiMaggio, of the groundbreaking “iron cage” article and then went on to publish a series of highly influential papers in social network analysis. John Padgett is one of political science’s leading formal modellers, having written seminal papers on budgeting & garbage can processes, the courts, and state formation. His most well known work is likely the “Medici paper,” which used network analysis to describe the cultivation of political power in early modern Italy and introduced the idea of “robust action” into modern social theory.

They will be discussing their new book: The Emergence of Organizations and Markets. Here’s a summary:

The social sciences are rich with ideas about how choice occurs among alternatives, but have little to say about the invention of new alternatives in the first place.  These authors directly address the question of emergence, both of what we choose and who we are.  With the use of sophisticated deductive models building on the concept of autocatalysis from biochemistry and rich historical cases studies spanning seven centuries, Padgett and Powell develop a theory of the co-evolution of social networks.  Novelty in new persons and new organizational forms emerges from spillovers across multiple, intertwined networks.  To be sure, actors make relations; but the mantra of this book is that in the long run relations make actors.  Through case studies of early capitalism and state formation, communist economic reforms and transition, and technologically advanced capitalism and science, the authors analyze speciation in the context of organizational novelty.  Drawing on ideas from both the physical sciences and the social sciences, and incorporating novel computational, historical, and network analyses, this book offers a genuinely new approach to the question of emergence.

This week and next week, I’ll post some thoughts that John and Woody have shared with me. This is *required* reading for sociologists, management scholars, political scientists, and economists. And yes, there, will be a quiz!

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is network analysis stuck?

Here’s how I view the history of social network analysis:

• Pre-history – Simmel (1900s) to Moreno (1930s): People start thinking about the “geometry” of social relationships.
• Network science 1.0 – Harary, Heider, Freeman, etc. (1950s – 1970s): People learn to convert relational data into matrix algebra.
• The holistic turn (1970s – 1980s): People start inventing measures of network structure (Bonacich, White).
• Statistical theory of networks (1970s-2000s):  The creation of P* models, and later dynamic network models, to account for non-independence.
• Socio-physics networks (2000s): Watts, Barbasi, and others from physics work on large scale properties of networks (e.g., power laws or small worlds).

So, by my account, the last major development in network analysis was about 10 years ago. Now, this isn’t to say that there isn’t excellent work, but it is normal science. Pick up a copy of Social Networks, or Network Science. You’ll see great articles, but they are usually investigating specific networks, or figuring out the details of some specific. Am I missing the next generation of network analysis? One possibility is that there will be new ideas coming from people doing experiments on networks for estimate causal effects. Other areas?

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friendship bleg

Someone asked me: what is the go to source on when people make friends during the life course?

Read these books backwards: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

recent social networks

A few recent articles from the journal Social Networks:

• Parigi and Sartori discuss party networks and cleavages in Italy.
• Networks and soccer team wins by Grund.
• Crossley, Edwards, Harries, and Stevenson discuss the trade off between efficacy and secrecy in movement networks.
• Amicus curiae (“friends of the court” briefing) networks by Box-Steffensmeir and Christensen

The recent article page is here.

Crazy good books: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

political networks in american behavioral scientist

My collaborator, Michael Heaney, has a nice article in the new American Behavioral Scientist where he measures polarization in party networks:

Previous research has documented that the institutional behaviors (e.g., lobbying,  campaign contributions) of political organizations reflect the polarization of these organizations along party lines. However, little is known about how these groups are connected at the level of individual party activists. Using data from a survey of 738 delegates at the 2008 Democratic and Republican national conventions, we use network regression analysis to demonstrate that co-membership networks of national party convention delegates are highly polarized by party, even after controlling for homophily due to ideology, sex/gender, race/ethnicity, age, educational attainment, income, and religious participation. Among delegates belonging to the same organization, only 1.78% of these co-memberships between delegates crossed party lines, and only 2.74% of the ties between organizations sharing common delegates were bipartisan in nature. We argue that segregation of organizational ties on the basis of party adds to the difficulty of finding common political ground between the parties.

Good for those interested in the growing literature on networks in political science.

Every library needs these books: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

abstract art networks

The art website Hyperallergic has a nifty new diagram illustrating the networks of artists responsible for abstract expressionism.

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Facebook field experiment shows strong ties affect voter turnout

The most recent Nature features an article by a team of political scientists and network scholars who did an experiment using Facebook to show that strong ties influenced voting behavior in the last election. You may say, so what? We’ve known for a long time that social influence operates through strong ties in interpersonal networks. That’s not a new insight.  But I think the study is innovative for a couple of reasons. The first is that the impact of of using direct messaging through Facebook was substantively significant  – that is, just messaging people reminders to go out and vote increased the likelihood that the person would vote – but that the larger effect was transmitted indirectly via social contagion. Consider the setup of the experiment.

america is not getting lonelier

A key empirical question in social network analysis is whether Americans have more or less friends over time. Famously, Robert Putnam argued that indeed, we were “bowling alone.” In contrast, critics contend that these are misinterpreted results. Some types of networks disappear, while other appear.

On the social network listserv, Claude Fischer provides the latest round in the debate. Fischer uses 2010 GSS data to claim that the decline in strong personal relationships reported by McPhereson et al. (2006 in the ASR) is due to survey question construction. I’ll quote Fischer’s entire announcement:

The “Old” New Institutionalism versus the “New” New Institutionalism

I signed on to blog on Orgtheory a couple of months ago with the express purpose of writing about “A Theory of Fields” (Oxford Press, 2012), my new book with Doug McAdam. So here it goes.

Today I want to explain something about the shape of research in organizational theory for the past 35 years ago in order to situate “A Theory of Fields” in that research. The cornerstones of the “new institutionalism” in organizational theory are three works, the Meyer and Rowan paper (1977), the DiMaggio and Powell paper (1983), and the book edited by Powell and DiMaggio (1991).

I would like to take the provocative position that since about 1990, most scholars have given up on the original formulation of the new institutionalism even though they are ritually fixated on citing these canonical works. It is worth thinking why they found that formulation limited.

The Meyer/Rowan and DiMaggio/Powell position on organizations is that actors in organizations do not have interests and that their actions are “programmed” by scripts. Moreover, actors are unable to figure out what to do, so they either follow the leader (i.e. mimic those they perceive as successful), act according to norms often propagated by professionals, or else find themselves coerced by state authorities. The Meyer/Rowan and DiMaggio/Powell world was not only void of actors; it was also void of change. Once such an order got into place, it became taken for granted and difficult to dislodge. “People” in this world told themselves stories, used myth and ceremony, and they decoupled their stories from what they were doing. This meant that the consequences of their actions were not important.  DiMaggio recognized this problem in 1988 when he suggested that in order to explain change we needed another theory one that involved actors, interests, power, and what he called “institutional entrepreneurs”.

The core of organizational studies since the early 1990s has been to reintroduce interests, actors, power and the problem of change into the center of organizational studies. Indeed, the field of entrepreneurship in management studies is probably at the moment, the hottest part of organizational theory. If one looks at these papers, one still sees ritual citing of DiMaggio/Powell and Meyer/Rowan. But the core ideas of these papers could not be farther from those works. The focus on entrepreneurial studies is on how new fields are like social movements. They come into existence during crises. They invoke the concept of institutional entrepreneurs who build the space and create new cultural frames, interests and identities. In doing so, the entrepreneurs build political coalitions to dominate the new order. Indeed, the gist of the past 15 years of organizational research is entirely antithetical to the “old” new institutionalism.

I submit to you that the time is now right to reject the “old” new institutionalism” entirely, free our minds, and produce a “new” new institutionalism.

hey, it’s scale free and … and …

A focus of network research since, say 1999 or so, has been to identify “laws” that generate large networks with certain properties.* For example, the small world network is built by rewiring a grid. Various processes generate power-law networks (i.e., the node distribution is described by a power law).

I can see two justifications for this type of research. The first is diffusion theory. The speed at which something diffuses in a network is definitely governed by the structure. The second is a sort of physical science justification, where you think of a network as a “system” and you show that some micro-process (e.g., preferential attachment) creates that network.

Is there any other behavioral implication of studying power laws/small worlds or other specific large scale properties? In other words, why should I care about scale free or small world networks aside from diffusion theory?

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* Let’s leave aside recent criticism of power-law centric research for the sake of the post.

duncan watts moves from yahoo to (microsoft?)

The network news of the day:

Duncan Watts, the social science researcher who has been at Yahoo since 2007, has left the company.

Yahoo confirmed the departure. Watts has reportedly joined Microsoft’s research organization, but the software company declined to comment.

Comments? I’m excited to see what he does at his new job.

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network science, a new journal

This seems like big news, a new multi-disciplinary journal on networks: Network Science.  First issue slated for Spring 2013.

(Hat tip: Rense Corten.)

the abundance of living alone

Eric Klinenberg is a sociologist who also happens to be a very good writer. Who needs a Malcolm Gladwell to popularize sociology when we already have good writers, like Klinenberg, in the discipline? His book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago is an example of his ability to present empirical sociology in an engaging and lucid form.

Eric’s latest book, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, expands on a theme of Heat Wave: that living alone is a growing trend, especially in urban areas, that has changed the nature of community and relationships.  In his former book Eric showed that the people most susceptible to the negative consequences of a major environmental disaster, like a heat wave, were those who lived alone and lacked a social safety net to assist them during the crisis. Although in Heat Wave he focused on the deleterious effects of “living and dying alone,” this book takes a broader perspective by first trying to understand why more people are making this life choice and then by examining its consequences on life quality.

One of the interesting insights of Going Solo is that living alone has become easier for people to do because there are so many ways in which people can create and flourish abundant social lives outside the home. Facebook, email, texting, and other social media provide numerous points of contact that shorten the social distance between friends and family. Someone who lived alone 30 years ago might have felt isolated because it was much more costly and difficult to maintain close contact with friends, but now personal communication with friends and family has become so easy to do that it can almost be overwhelming.

One woman we interviewed, an attorney in her early thirties who works in politics, tells me: ‘Of my nine-hour day, I’m spending seven hours responding to emails’ – mostly job related, but many from friends and family too. ‘I also have, like, three hundred fifty people in my cell phone,’ she explains. It buzzes often, she checks it constantly, and she always tries to respond quickly, even if she’s out with friends and the call or message is from work.

This behavior is not unusual. Although we often associate living alone with social isolation, for most adults the reverse is true. In many cases, those who live alone are socially overextended, and hyperactive use of digital media keeps them even busier. The young urban professionals we interviewed reported that they struggle more with avoiding the distraction of always available social activity, from evenings with friends to online chatter, than with being disconnected. ‘Singles in the U.S.: The New Nuclear Family’ confirms this. The large-scale study by the market research firm Packaged Facts reports that those who live alone are more likely than others to say that the Internet has changed the way they spend their free time, more likely to be online late at night, and more likely to say that using the Net has cut into their sleep. Not that they are homebodies. According to a Pew Foundation study of social isolation and technology, heavy users of the Internet and social media are actually more likely than others to have large and diverse social networks, visit public places where strangers may interact, and participate in volunteer organizations (pg. 64).

If people used to seek domestic life in order to avoid social isolation, social technology seems to have weakened some of that need. People, especially those who can afford to stay connected and have a busy social life, may find pairing up and having kids less appealing than ever.

This book is full of fascinating facts and anecdotes about why and how people manage to live alone. This would be a great book for undergraduate courses in urban/community sociology, social networks, social problems, or even an introductory course in sociology.

creative groups

It’s been a while since we’ve knocked heads with our evil twin blog.  I can’t let this one pass. Peter Klein misrepresents the main point of this Jonah Lehrer New Yorker article, which dissects the myth that brainstorming leads to creativity and greater problem solving. Citing a quote by former orgtheory guest blogger Keith Sawyer – “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas” – Peter implies that groups would be more creative if they’d just let individuals work on their own. This fits nicely with a pure reductionist perspective but it’s not at all what the article is really trying to say.

This is the conclusion that Peter should have drawn from the essay: “[L]ike it or not, human creativity has increasingly become a group process.”  Lehrer goes on to cite research by my colleagues at Northwestern, Ben Jones and Brian Uzzi, which shows that both scientists and Broadway teams are more successful and creative when bringing together teams made up of diverse individuals. From an article in Science by Wuchty, Jones, and Uzzi:

By analyzing 19.9 million peer-reviewed academic papers and 2.1 million patents from the past fifty years, [Jones] has shown that levels of teamwork have increased in more than ninety-five per cent of scientific subfields; the size of the average team has increased by about twenty per cent each decade. The most frequently cited studies in a field used to be the product of a lone genius, like Einstein or Darwin. Today, regardless of whether researchers are studying particle physics or human genetics, science papers by multiple authors receive more than twice as many citations as those by individuals. This trend was even more apparent when it came to so-called “home-run papers”—publications with at least a hundred citations. These were more than six times as likely to come from a team of scientists.

And summarizing Uzzi’s and Spiro’s AJS paper on Broadway shows:

Uzzi devised a way to quantify the density of these connections, a figure he called Q. If musicals were being developed by teams of artists that had worked together several times before—a common practice, because Broadway producers see “incumbent teams” as less risky—those musicals would have an extremely high Q. A musical created by a team of strangers would have a low Q…..When the Q was low—less than 1.7 on Uzzi’s five-point scale—the musicals were likely to fail. Because the artists didn’t know one another, they struggled to work together and exchange ideas. “This wasn’t so surprising,” Uzzi says. “It takes time to develop a successful collaboration.” But, when the Q was too high (above 3.2), the work also suffered. The artists all thought in similar ways, which crushed innovation. According to Uzzi, this is what happened on Broadway during the nineteen-twenties, which he made the focus of a separate study. The decade is remembered for its glittering array of talent—Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II, and so on—but Uzzi’s data reveals that ninety per cent of musicals produced during the decade were flops, far above the historical norm. “Broadway had some of the biggest names ever,” Uzzi explains. “But the shows were too full of repeat relationships, and that stifled creativity.”

In short, Uzzi argues that teams that had intermediate levels of relationship density were more creative and more successful.

It’s not that groups aren’t effective generators of creativity. As these studies show, innovation tends to be produced via group processes. Knowledge production is increasingly a collective outcome. Rather than assume that people work best alone, we should think more carefully about what kinds of groups are optimally designed for producing creativity.  Diverse groups will be more creative than homogeneous groups. Groups that embrace conflict and critical thought will be less susceptible to groupthink than groups that avoid such conflict.  Groups made up of members who have little experience with outsiders will be less creative.  I agree with Peter that brainstorming is ineffectively taught in many classrooms, but rather than throw out the idea altogether, we should try to teach people how to design groups that are good at generating new ideas.

the network that runs the world

• The New Scientist – “Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world.”
• arXiv blog entry on “econophysicists identify world’s top 10 most powerful companies.”
• The papers on arXiv.

linkedin network bleg

Someone out there must use LinkedIn and know how its networking tools work. If that’s you, I need your help. I’d like to use LinkedIn to show students how to analyze their social network. I know that LinkedIn has its own network mapping tool that lets you visualize your network, but I don’t know if there is a way to export the nodes so that you can do your own analysis of it. I’d really like a way to export the network in a text or excel file. Does anyone know of a way to do this?

psychology of organizational networks

In case readers haven’t seen this, Organization Science has a call for papers out for a special issue on the psychology of organizational networks.  Details can be found by clicking here (pdf).  Or click below the fold. 

twitter, social science and mood

[link via David Lazer]

Twitter is getting lots of interest from social scientists.  Here’s a piece from the current issue of Science about how “social scientists wade into the tweet stream” (the figure below is from this article).  And, an NPR piece on a forthcoming Science article by Macy and Golder on affect and mood and twitter.

the performativity of networks

Prompted in part by some conversations at the ASA meetings, in part by Gabriel’s discussion of the Social Structures author-meets-critics session, and in part by some gentle prodding from Cosma Shalizi, here’s a current draft of a paper of mine, The Performativity of Networks, that I’ve been sitting on for rather too long. Here’s the abstract:

The “performativity thesis” is the claim that parts of contemporary economics and finance, when carried out into the world by professionals and popularizers, reformat and reorganize the phenomena they purport to describe, in ways that bring the world into line with theory. Practical technologies, calculative devices and portable algorithms give actors tools to implement particular models of action. I argue that social network analysis is performative in the same sense as the cases studied in this literature. Social network analysis and finance theory are similar in key aspects of their development and effects. For the case of economics, evidence for weaker versions of the performativity thesis in quite good, and the strong formulation is circumstantially supported. Network theory easily meets the evidential threshold for the weaker versions; I offer empirical examples that support the strong (or “Barnesian”) formulation. Whether these parallels are a mark in favor of the thesis or a strike against it is an open question. I argue that the social network technologies and models now being “performed” build out systems of generalized reciprocity, connectivity, and commons-based production. This is in contrast both to an earlier network imagery that emphasized self-interest and entrepreneurial exploitation of structural opportunities, and to the model of action typically considered to be performed by economic technologies.

The usual disclaimers about work-in-progress apply.

couchsurfing friendships visualized

Via Rense – a visualization of couchsurfing friendships.

.

Here’s the explanation:

Blue ties represent friendships from outside the organization. Red ties represent friendships formed within the CouchSurfing organization. We have no information about grey ties. The width of tie is proportional with the indicated strength of the friendship: i.e., from “acquaintance” to “best friend.”  The movie was done in SoNiA, a highly-recommended free dynamic network visualization tool.

google+ circles i really need

From Happy Place. (HT: @bduckles)

cognition as networks

With the increasing interest in the cognitive structures that underlie organizational and market activity, I think it is important to take a step back and think more carefully about the constructs and how they are used.  A quick glance at the literature reveals a long inventory of cognitive structures used in research – categories, frames, schemas, logics, scripts, recipes, etc …  Currently within organizational theory there is much emphasis on categories and how they constrain and enable market behavior.  While there certainly is good reason why categories should matter, we should ask ourselves if categories are the right unit of analysis.

Let me propose that a more tractable way of thinking about cognition is to treat categories as embedded within a broader network of other categories through a series of relationships – essentially what is called a schema.  Empirically, this means capturing the nouns/phrases as categories and the verbs as relations that connect them.  See Kathleen Carley and colleagues efforts to draw such cognitive maps.  In my own work, with Christopher Bingham, we have applied this technique to analyze how the insurance industry conceptualized the early business computer.  But, what do we gain by looking at the network as opposed to the individual categories?

One reason why considering the conceptual network is important is that cognitive mechanisms, such as analogies, leverage the relational structure and not the category structure.  Gentner and colleagues have characterized analogies as mapping a relational structure between something familiar and the new concept.  Something new is familiar because of the shared relational structure as opposed to sharing the same category. In fact, in our work with the computer, we observe two distinct analogies – one comparing the computer to existing office machinery and the other, to the human brain.   Just focusing on categories would miss this powerful mechanism to expand and develop new categories.

satanic networks

Um, dudes, can you check your copy of Wasserman and Faust (1994) for me? Yeah, go to the subject index (p. 811) and check the first few entries for the letter “B.” Does your copy have “beast” listed in it? What page number is listed for that topic? Thanks, dudes.

Update: Omar used Holy Water and gloves made from the Shroud of Turin to find this link.

ucinet/networks bleg

I have bipartite network data. But some individuals claim to be linked to many, many organizations. So almost all orgs are connected to each other. How can I ask UCINET to make two orgs linked iff # of co-memberships > X, where X is some threshold?

six degrees of danish bacon

The current issue of New Left Review has an article by Franco Moretti applying a bit of network analysis to the interactions within some pieces of literature. Here is the interaction network in Hamlet, with a tie being defined by whether the characters speak to one another. (Notice that this means that, e.g., Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do not have a tie, even though they’re in the same scenes.)

The Hamlet network

And here is Hamlet without Hamlet:

Hamlet without Hamlet

I think we can safely say that he is a key figure in the network. Though the Prince may be less crucial than he thinks, as Horatio seems to be pretty well positioned, too. Lots more in the article itself.

heaney on network causality

Aside from being my collaborator on social movement research, Michael Heaney is interested in research methods. He has published a new article on causality in social network analysis in the journal American Politics Research. This paper, co-authored with James Fowler, David Nickerson, John Padgett and Betsy Sinclair, addresses the problems with making causal claims with network data.

Investigations of American politics have increasingly turned to analyses of political networksto understand public opinion, voting behavior, the diffusion of policy ideas, bill sponsorship in the legislature, interest group coalitions and influence, party factions, institutional development, and other empirical phenomena. While the association between political networks and political behavior is well established, clear causal inferences are often difficult to make. This article consists of five independent essays that address practical problems in making causal inferences from studies of political networks. They consider egocentric studies of national probability samples, sociocentric studies of political communities, measurement error in elite surveys, field experiments on networks, and triangulating on causal processes.

The full paper is here. Recommended.

hedonometrics: happiness and twitter

Here’s a novel paper by Peter Sheridan Dodd et al  – Temporal patterns of happiness and information in a global social network: Hedonometrics and twitter.

Abstract

Individual happiness is a fundamental societal metric. Normally measured through self-report, happiness has often been indirectly characterized and overshadowed by more readily quantifiable economic indicators, such as gross domestic product. Here, we use a real-time, remote-sensing, non-invasive, text-based approach—a kind of hedonometer—to uncover collective dynamical patterns of happiness levels expressed by over 50 million users in the online, global social network Twitter. With a data set comprising nearly 2.8 billion expressions involving more than 28 billion words, we explore temporal variations in happiness, as well as information levels, over time scales of hours, days, and months. Among many observations, we find a steady global happiness level, evidence of universal weekly and daily patterns of happiness and information, and that happiness and information levels are generally uncorrelated. We also extract and analyse a collection of happiness and information trends based on keywords, showing them to be both sensible and informative, and in effect generating opinion polls without asking questions. Finally, we develop and employ a graphical method that reveals how individual words contribute to changes in average happiness between any two texts.

unusual irb requests

I’m reposting this from Scatterplot:

And another question on behalf of someone else. My IRB thinks it is not possible for them to approve to network research using a methodology in which subjects are handed a list of names and asked which people on the list they know. The reason for this, per IRB, is that people have to sign a consent form before their names can be put on any such list. Thus the researchers are being told that everyone has to sign two consent forms, first for the compilation of the list, and second for doing the survey. This IRB regularly says that organizations cannot turn over lists of their employees or members to researchers for the purpose of initiating a request to be in a research project.  Is this a common objection? Does anyone have examples of research with a similar methodology getting approval from other IRBs? Would it make a difference if the list in question is public or semi-public, i.e. a paper neighborhood or school directory that is delivered to everyone in a neighborhood or school, or a web site that lists all of a group’s members? Please cross-post elsewhere if you know of another pool of people who might know the answer. (I’m thinking of orgtheory here, but there may be other groups.)

This seems like an abnormally aggressive position for an IRB. Any suggestions for OW? Has anyone else had a similar experience working with their IRB?

It seems like the real privacy issue is protecting the people on the list from knowing if ego picked him or her as a friend. It’s not as if ego doesn’t already know who works in his or her company. As long as you were able to protect the anonymity of subjects once the data were compiled in a data set, I’m not sure why this is a concern at all.

soc networks readings

A Social Networks reading list that I put together with a colleague for a graduate seminar that we taught a couple of years ago might be of interest to some of you.

network is the new group

Recently, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) issued a request-for-proposal that invited researchers to develop theory to predict when and where social networks would emerge. They want to know how “networks” like Al Qaeda come to be. This caught my eye because I think the idea of networks emerging only makes sense if you are confusing networks with groups.

Networks are clearly popular. Every new club, association, organization and website today wants to be called a network. Network is the new group. What might have been called the “Lexington Preservation Society” in the past would very likely be called the “Lexington Preservation Network” if formed today. The popularity of the term probably does reflect a greater awareness of interpersonal relationships, but I don’t think there is a fundamental difference between these uses of “network” and the now replaced “group”.

Let’s test your network IQ. Suppose I told you I was studying a network with no ties: just a set of individuals. Does this violate your sense of network? If so, I think you are thinking of a group. Groups (certainly in contrast to classes) have a certain degree of internal cohesion. What if I said my network had lots of ties, but they were organized into three fragments or islands, such that all ties were within the fragments and none between. Would you say I have three networks instead of one? If so, I think you’re thinking of a group. Groups have some kind of boundary. They may be fuzzy, contested, or dynamic, but the notion of a boundary is fundamental to the notion of group.*

Networks, in contrast, have arbitrary boundaries and no expectations of cohesion. They are analytical devices. I call a network into existence simply by picking a population of nodes I would like to study and selecting a type of social tie that may connect these nodes. For example, I could choose to study friendships among the set of students living on one floor of a freshman dorm at a university. At the start of the semester, the network may be completely empty of ties: no one is friends with anyone else. A few weeks later, I may find that there are many pairs of students who are friends, and maybe even one or two short chains where A is friends with B who is friends with C. By the end of the semester, I might find that nearly everyone is at least indirectly connected to everyone else by some kind of path, and I may also find that some groups have emerged in which members have more ties with each other than to outsiders.

Note that conceptualizing the network in this abstract way has certain advantages. For one thing, it makes it easy to talk about network evolution. A network doesn’t emerge fully formed out of the Void — it evolves. But what is “it”? If you let me define the network in my arbitrary way, I can watch how “its” structure changes over time from having no ties to the end-of-semester structure (and, over the ensuing decades, perhaps back to having no ties). For another thing, it unconfounds the network from its structure. The number of ties now becomes a variable, so I can do things like test the hypothesis that a team’s performance increases with the number of trust ties. The degree of fragmentation is also a variable. As a result, a counter-intelligence agency can measure the extent to which it has succeeded in fragmenting a terrorist network.

The abstract approach does introduce some limitations. In this way of conceptualizing networks, it no longer makes sense to ask what the best way is to uncover a network. Should I measure interaction or affect, or something else? The answer is: you can measure anything you like – whatever you do measure defines a network. You can study the interaction network, the affective network or even the network of who doesn’t know whom. In the abstract approach, it also doesn’t make sense to ask, as the Dept of Defense has asked, when will a network emerge? The answer is: whenever an analyst conceives it. The network is always there. It is only the structure that changes over time. It is not a thing in the same way that a group is.

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*Ok, I know that the fragments bit is actually more about cohesion than boundaries. So sue me.

steve borgatti, social networks guru

We’re excited to have Steve Borgatti, social networks guru, guest blogging here at orgtheory.net.  Steve Borgatti is Professor and Chellgren Endowed Chair at the University of Kentucky.  You can find additional information about Steve and his research on his web site.

Orgheads might be particularly interested in his forthcoming Organization Science piece on (pdf) ”Network Theorizing” — the article addresses confusion associated with network theorizing, the nature of network theorizing, the generation of new network theory, etc.

We look forward to Steve’s posts!

book forum: social structures, part 3

Part 1, Part 2

Levi Martin crams a lot of stuff into his writing. Feels like a Summarize Proust Competition and I’m not doing too well…

Anyway, the last three chapters of the book turn to a new topic: social control. In the first half of the book, Levi Martin discussed social structures in terms of inequality. Social structures are created and modified as a result of inequality. Now, the issue is influence and coordination. How is it that simpler structures are built up into larger things like states and armies?

Levi Martin’s answer has to do with patronage and brokering. As I noted, a short blog post doesn’t do justice to the argument, but the idea is that communities often end up with patronage structures. The key is then to make the patrons brokers in a larger system. The rank and file get goodies and inequality is addressed. The patrons get the influence that they need to control people. And the monarch (or other leader) gets the ability to mobilize huge masses, when the occasion arises. This basic logic for aggregating smaller patronage groups into massive structures can be seen in commerce, politics, and religion.

If you know about the history of the firm or the European state, this story is plausible. One might argue, for example, that the period between late antiquity and the modern nation state is just one long effort at reforming a pile of patronage relationships from the Roman system to the sovereign nation states. This is also consistent with recent business history. Freedman’s re-reading of GM’s history backs this point up. The firm works when division heads are allowed to broker between the central office and the rest of the firm.

One interesting point to raise with this whole story is the role of discipline. The point of Weber, Foucault, Gorski, and others is that modern social structures require modern self-disciplining people. Levi Martin does allude to this point, but it plays a secondary role. The need for control, influence, equality, etc drives social structure. In this respect, there’s a lingering functionalism in the text, but it’s one I can live with.

A related point has to do with institutions. In Levi Martin’s text, my sense is that culture and institutional logics play a secondary role as well. But one of the most interesting things about modern life is the correlation of culture and social structure. The rise of large states and firms coincides with ideas of rationality, individualism, and democracy. Reading Social Structures, it would be hard for me figure out whether culture is a cause or effect of social structure.

Overall, I liked Social Structures and it gives us much food for thought. I’ll teach it in my upcoming graduate course on social organization.