SONIC is currently hosting the ATLAS team within its lab space. ATLAS (Advancing Teams, Leaders, and Systems) is the group formerly known as DELTA (Developing Effective Leaders, Teams, and Alliances) – expats from Georgia Tech, headed by their director Leslie DeChurch, who transferred to the Northwestern University this fall. Four students followed Leslie DeChurch: Lindsay Larson, Ashley Niler, Gabe Plummer, and Ilya Gokhman.
ATLAS are waiting for their lab space to be built out and equipped in time for the Winter Quarter. In the meantime, we are all enjoying the very close collaboration on our joint projects.
Despite what some politicians say, no country is an island in today’s rapidly changing world. In the same way, no company can survive as an island, either.
Most won’t have noticed a recent $6.5 million Series A for a company calledMobilize, but it’s indicative of a major change occurring in businesses today. Companies’ growing reliance on a distributed workforce have been occupying headlines and podcasts for the past couple of years. However, these conversations must now turn to how companies increasingly depend on partnerships as their force multiplier.
Police Use Surveillance Tool to Scan Social Media, A.C.L.U. says.
A Chicago company has marketed a tool using text, photos, and videos gleaned from major social media companies to aid law enforcement in surveillance of protesters, civil liberties activists say.
Click on the image below to read the whole article in The New York Times online.
SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Eric Quintane who will present a talk on Monday, December 5th, 2016 at 10:00 AM in Frances Searle Building, Room 1-483. All are welcome to attend. To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Dr. Quintane please schedule a time HERE. Please contact SONIC Lab Manager Katya Bitkin with any questions or comments.
How do Brokers Broker?
Tertius Gaudens, Tertius Iungens, and the Temporality of Structural Holes
Abstract
Organizational network research has demonstrated that multiple benefits accrue to people occupying brokerage positions. However, the extant literature offers scant evidence of the process postulated to drive such benefits –information brokerage– and therefore leaves unaddressed the question of brokers broker. We address this gap by examining the information-brokerage interactions in which actors engage. We argue that the information-brokerage strategies of brokers differ in three critical ways from those of actors embedded in denser network positions. First, brokers more often broker information via short-term interactions with colleagues outside their network of long-term relationships, a process we label “unembedded brokerage.” Second, when they engage in unembedded brokerage, brokers are more likely than are actors in dense network positions to intermediate the flow of information between the brokered parties, consistent with a tertius gaudens strategy. Conversely, and third, when they broker information via their network of long-term ties (embedded brokerage), brokers are more likely than are densely connected actors to facilitate a direct information exchange between the brokered parties, consistent with a tertius iungens strategy. Using a relational event model, we find support for our arguments in an empirical analysis of email communications among employees in a medium-sized, knowledge-intensive organization, as well as in a replication study. The theory and evidence we present advance a novel, temporal perspective on how brokers broker, which reconciles structural and process views of network brokerage. Our findings substantiate the notion of brokers as a dynamic force driving change in organizational networks, and they help to integrate within a unitary explanatory framework tertius iungens and tertius gaudens views of brokerage.
Biography
Eric Quintane is an associate professor of management at the School of Management, The University of Los Andes, Bogota, Colombia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne (Australia). His research interests include dynamics of organizational networks, temporality of social processes, creativity and innovation.
… the unplugging movement is the latest incarnation of an ageless effort to escape the everyday, to retreat from the hustle and bustle of life in search of its still core. Like Thoreau ignoring the locomotive that passed by his cabin at Walden Pond or the Anabaptists rejecting electricity, members of the unplugging movement scorn technology in the hope of finding the authenticity and the community that they think it obscures.
Mathijs de Vaan and David Stark, Columbia University
Balazs Vedres, Central European University
This article examines the sociological factors that explain why some creative teams are able to produce game changers—cultural products that stand out as distinctive while also being critically recognized as outstanding. The authors build on work pointing to structural folding—the network property of a cohesive group whose membership overlaps with that of another cohesive group. They hypothesize that the effects of structural folding on game changing success are especially strong when overlapping groups are cognitively distant. Measuring social distance separately from cognitive distance and distinctiveness independently from critical acclaim, the authors test their hypothesis about structural folding and cognitive diversity by analyzing team reassembly for 12,422 video games and the career histories of 139,727 video game developers. When combined with cognitive distance, structural folding channels and mobilizes a productive tension of rules, roles, and codes that promotes successful innovation. In addition to serving as pipes and prisms, network ties are also the source of tools and tensions.
Latin America wants to rejoin the world. Will the world reciprocate?
Some countries in Latin America, especially those on the Pacific seaboard, like Mexico, Chile and Peru, never turned their backs on globalization. Others did. Boosted by record prices for their commodity exports, they turned inward and subjected their economies to state controls, repeating on a smaller scale the model that failed the region in the 1970s.
SONIC is co-sponsoring the 2016 Organizational Communication Mini-Conference (OCMC), hosted by the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.
SONIC PhD student Marlon Twyman is a member of the conference’s planning committee. He will also present a paper “Networks of Computer-Mediated Team Assembly.” Aaron Schecter, a PhD candidate, is also presenting at this conference on “Bridging the Boundary While Minding the Seams: Team Boundary Propensities in Multiteam Systems.”
The purpose of the OCMC is to feature and support graduate students pursuing research about organizational communication. The two-day event provides burgeoning scholars in the field with the opportunity to present their dissertations or other research projects, receive feedback, and socialize with their peers and with established faculty. The informal atmosphere of the OCMC is also well suited for students who wish to present and receive constructive criticism on early dissertation plans.
On September 9, 2016 Noshir Contractor presented at the Department of Computer Science and Automation Seminar Series at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India. He spoke on the topic of Leveraging Computational Social Science to Address Grand Societal Challenges.
ATLAS (Advancing Teams, Leaders, and Systems) is the group formerly known as DELTA (Developing Effective Leaders, Teams, and Alliances) – expats from Georgia Tech, headed by their director Leslie DeChurch, who transferred to the Northwestern University this fall. Four students followed Leslie DeChurch: Lindsay Larson, Ashley Niler, Gabe Plummer, and Ilya Gokhman.