In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

Social Network Analysis

Men and Women of the Corporation

Organizational learning II: Theory, method and practice

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Social network analysis, now often thought of simply as network science, has penetrated nearly every scientific and many scholarly fields and has become an indispensable resource. Yet, social netwo...

Social Networks and Cognition

This is a descriptive study of the structure of communications in a modern organization. We analyze a dataset with millions of electronic mail messages, calendar meetings and teleconferences for many thousands of employees of a single, multidivisional firm during a three-month period in calendar 2006. The basic question we explore asks, what is the role of observable (to us) boundaries between individuals in structuring communications inside the firm? We measure three general types of boundaries: organizational boundaries (strategic business unit and function memberships), spatial boundaries (office locations and inter-office distances), and social categories (gender, tenure within the firm). In dyad-level models of the probability that pairs of individuals communicate, we find very large effects of formal organization structure and spatial collocation on the rate of communication. Homophily effects based on sociodemographic categories are much weaker. In individual-level regressions of engagement in category-spanning communication patterns, we find that women, mid- to high-level executives, and members of the executive management, sales and marketing functions are most likely to participate in cross-group communications. In effect, these individuals bridge the lacunae between distant groups in the company's social structure.

Communication (and Coordination?) in a Modern, Complex Organization

In multidivisional firms, the corporate staff is central to the implementation of corporate-level strategy, but empirical evidence on its function is limited. We examine one corporate staff through e-mail analysis. We find sharp cross-sectional differences in communication patterns: staff members have networks that are larger, more integrative, and richer in structural holes. However, much of this difference is attributed to sorting processes, rather than being caused by employment in the corporate staff per se. Further, once people receive the ‘corporate imprimatur,’ they retain aspects of it even when they move back to the line organization. These results imply that the literature’s emphasis on structure as a means to achieve coordination undervalues a selection process in which individuals with broad networks match to coordination-focused jobs in the corporate staff.

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Inside the Black Box of the Corporate Staff: Social Networks and the Implementation of Corporate Strategy

Organizational network scholars have not yet fully exploited the information revolution for data on intraorganizational social networks. To encourage research using electronic data, we analyze the correspondence between e-mail and survey measures of the same social network. Substantively, we find that clustering is explained by actor attributes (hierarchy, tenure and group) in the survey measure, but appears to be endogenous in the e-mail measure – that is, relative to electronic traces of observable interactions, survey respondents tend to over-state ties to high-status alters and under-state ties to physically and organizationally distant alters. We conclude that survey data provide information about actors’ perceptions of a network and should be used when those perceptions are of substantive interest. In contrast, observational data such as e-mails measure the objective communication structure and are a better data source for research questions that depend on measurement of the actual flow of communications. The authors would like to thank Galina Daraganova, Dean Lusher, Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, Pip Pattison, Gary Robbins, Toby Stuart, Mike Tushman, Tom Valente, Peng Wang, seminar participants at the Harvard Business School, and conference attendees at INSNA’s SunBelt conference for their valuable comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors are our own. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Eric Quintane, Institute of Management, University of Lugano – Lugano, Switzerland, eric.quintane@usi.ch; phone +41 58 666 44 74.

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Matter Over Mind? E-mail Data and the Measurement of Social Networks

Whereas most research on network evolution has focused on the role of interaction opportunities in the formation of new ties, this paper addresses tie decay choices. When the opportunity structure gets reorganized, social actors make choices about which ties to retain and which to allow to decay, informed by their past experience of the tie. I argue that, conditional on changes in opportunity, people (especially those with Machiavellian personalities) choose to retain ties to valuable contacts, they retain reciprocated ties (especially with highly empathic others), and they retain socially embedded ties (especially if they are low self-monitors). The empirical design, which exploits a randomized natural experiment, confirms these hypotheses and suggests that our understanding of tie decay choices—and, consequently, of network evolution—is enhanced by an integrated theoretical perspective that encompasses both social structure and social psychology. This paper was accepted by Olav Sorenson, organizations.

Adam M. Kleinbaum

Papers

Social Networks and Cognition

Communication (and Coordination?) in a Modern, Complex Organization

Inside the Black Box of the Corporate Staff: Social Networks and the Implementation of Corporate Strategy

Matter Over Mind? E-mail Data and the Measurement of Social Networks

Reorganization and Tie Decay Choices