Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localize...

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Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks

How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

This article outlines the mechanism by which brokerage provides social capital. Opinion and behavior are more homogeneous within than between groups, so people connected across groups are more familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving. Brokerage across the structural holes between groups provides a vision of options otherwise unseen, which is the mechanism by which brokerage becomes social capital. I review evidence consistent with the hypothesis, then look at the networks around managers in a large American electronics company. The organization is rife with structural holes, and brokerage has its expected correlates. Compensation, positive performance evaluations, promotions, and good ideas are disproportionately in the hands of people whose networks span structural holes. The between-group brokers are more likely to express ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to have ideas evaluated as valuable. I close with implications for creativity and structural change.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1086/421787.pdf

Structural Holes and Good Ideas.

Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

The 2008 crash has left all the established economic doctrines - equilibrium models, real business cycles, disequilibria models - in disarray. Part of the problem is due to Smith’s "veil of ignorance": individuals unknowingly pursue society’s interest and, as a result, have no clue as to the macroeconomic effects of their actions: witness the Keynes and Leontief multipliers, the concept of value added, fiat money, Engel’s law and technical progress, to name but a few of the macrofoundations of microeconomics. A good viewpoint to take bearings anew lies in comparing the post-Great Depression institutions with those emerging from Thatcher and Reagan’s economic policies: deregulation, exogenous vs. endoge- nous money, shadow banking vs. Volcker’s Rule. Very simply, the banks, whose lending determined deposits after Roosevelt, and were a public service became private enterprises whose deposits determine lending. These underlay the great moderation preceding 2006, and the subsequent crash.

The Economic Institutions of Capitalism

Organizations performing non-routine, innovative, often knowledge- intensive tasks - for example professional partnerships - need a rather flat, collegial, and non - bureaucratic structure This book examines cooperation among partners in a US corporate law firm and provides a grounded theory of collective action among rival peers, or collegiality It is first network study of such a frim Members (partners and associates) are portrayed as independent entrepreneurs who build social niches in their organization and cultivate status competition among themselves This behaviour allows them to fulfil their commitment to an extremely constraining partnership agreement and generates informal social mechanisms (bounded solidarity, lateral control, oligarchic regualtion) that help a flat organization govern itself: maintain individual performance, even for tenured partners; capitalize knowledge and control quality; monitor and sanction opportunistic free-riding; solve the 'too many chefs' problem; balance the powers of rainmakers and schedulers; and integrate the firm in spite of many centrifugal forces

These mechanisms and the solutions they provide are examined using a broadly-conceived structural approach combining theory-driven network analysis, ethnography of task forces performing knowledge-intensive work, and analysis of management and internal politics in the firm Emmanuel Lazega presents a theory of the collegial organization which generalizes its results to all kinds of partnerships, larger multinational professional services firms, and collegial pockets in flattening bureaucracies alike

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The Collegial Phenomenon: The Social Mechanisms of Cooperation among Peers in a Corporate Law Partnership

Multiplexity, generalized exchange and cooperation in organizations: a case study

https://hal-sciencespo.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01521673/document

Exponential random graph models for multilevel networks

The Collegial Phenomenon

http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~brian/780/bibliography/09%20Other%20Models/Lazega%20(1997)%20Position%20in%20formal%20structure,%20personal%20characteristics%20and%20choices%20of%20advisors%20in%20a%20law%20firm%20a%20logistic%20regression%20model%20for%20dyadic%20network%20data.pdf

Emmanuel Lazega

Papers

The Collegial Phenomenon: The Social Mechanisms of Cooperation among Peers in a Corporate Law Partnership

Multiplexity, generalized exchange and cooperation in organizations: a case study

Exponential random graph models for multilevel networks

The Collegial Phenomenon

Position in formal structure, personal characteristics and choices of advisors in a law firm: A logistic regression model for dyadic network data