Social action is situated in fields that are simultaneously composed of interpersonal ties and relations among organizations, which are both usefully characterized as social networks. We introduce a novel approach to distinguishing different network macro-structures in terms of cohesive subsets and their overlaps. We develop a vocabulary that relates different forms of network cohesion to field...

OSS developers bring to a project more than the skills and knowledge acquired through years of experience. They bring with them the ability to acquire resources from their social networks. The skills and capabilities of the developers referred to as ‘human capital’ by economists are supplemented by the capabilities to access resources from the network referred to as ‘social capital’ by sociolog...

This paper describes an approach to the analysis of lexical cohesion using WordNet. The approach automatically annotates texts with potential cohesive ties, and supports various thesaurus based and text based search facilities as well as different views on the annotated texts. The purpose is to be able to investigate large amounts of text in order to get a clearer idea to what extent semantic r...

Little is known about the recovery of narrative discourse after stroke. While several studies have analyzed the recovery of language in individuals with aphasia, few known studies exist on the recovery of narrative discourse in stroke survivors, particularly those who have not been diagnosed with aphasia. In this study, we evaluated the cohesiveness of narrative discourse in a cohort of individ...

The Strength of Weak Ties and Brokerage Theory rely on the argument that weak bridging ties deliver novel information to brokers. Yet, very little empirical evidence exists to validate this claim. Analyzing an evolving corporate email network, we investigate the dynamic mechanisms that enable the “vision advantage”. Three results emerge. First, we confirm the Diversity-Bandwidth Tradeoff at the...

This study approaches online social networking from the opposite direction, focusing on unsociability, in an attempt to find out how friendships are negotiated and terminated online. The research data was obtained via an online survey (N=107) targeted to SNS users. The findings show that Facebook is closely connected to offline social life, and the fading of offline relationship was the most co...

The effect of brick-and-mortar and online factors on the formation of citation and reply ties is studied using an unique data set that compiles blogging activity within a global IT services firm for over a year and a half. We found that online ties over the blog network are not limited by the brick-and-mortar ties. Rather, they behave as a cohesive, persistent, and independent group. Further ex...

Entrepreneurial groups face a twinned challenge: recognizing new ideas and implementing them. Recent research suggests that connectivity reaching outside the group channels new ideas, while closure makes it possible to act on them. By contrast, we argue that entrepreneurship is not about importing ideas but about generating new knowledge by recombining resources. In contrast to the brokerage-pl...

Social network analysts have often collected data on negative relations such as dislike, avoidance, and conflict. Most often, the ties are analyzed in such a way that the fact that they are negative is of no consequence. For example, they have often been used in blockmodeling analyses where many different kinds of ties are used together and all ties are treated the same, regardless of meaning. ...

How do collaborative networks influence an individual’s creativity? Some have argued that structural brokerage – having direct ties to collaborators who do not have direct ties with one another leads to greater creativity. Others have argued for the benefits of cohesive and redundant ties between an individual’s collaborators. To resolve the controversy, we argue that brokerage confers continge...