![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/social-network-bsk1.jpg?resize=584%2C584\" "\\"social")
<\/a><\/p>\nAltogether, the organization\u00a0appears\u00a0surprisingly\u00a0well-integrated. Most ‘outsiders’ and most weakly-connected \u2018islands\u2019 are either occasional external readers, or new colleagues\u00a0being\u00a0‘socialized’\u00a0into the organization. Obviously, some people are more ‘central’ in the sense of connecting to a more diverse set of\u00a0people, while others\u00a0serve as boundary-spanners reaching to people who would otherwise remain unconnected to the core.\u00a0 I find the figure intellectually and\u00a0aesthetically\u00a0pleasing (given that it is generated with two lines of code) and perhaps a more thorough\u00a0analysis of the network\u00a0can be useful in organizational management as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
All organizations have a ‘deep’ hidden structure based on the social interactions among its members which might or might not coincide with the official formal one. University departments are no exception – if anything, the informal alliances, affinities, and allegiances within academic departments are only too visible and salient. Network analysis provides one way of visualizing and exploring the ‘deep’ organizational structure. In order to learn how to visualize small networks with R, I collected data on the social interactions within my own department and plugged the dataset in R (igraph package)\u00a0to get the plot below. The figure shows the social network of my institute based on the co-supervision of student dissertations (each Master thesis has a supervisor who selects a so-called ‘second’ reader who reviews the draft and the two supervisors examine the student during the defence). So each link between nodes (people)\u00a0is based on one joint supervision of a student. The total number of links (edges) is 264 which covers (approximately) all dissertations defended\u00a0over the last year.\u00a0In this version of the graph, the people are represented only by numbers but in the full version the actual names of people are plotted, the links are directional, and additional info (like the grade of the thesis) can be incorporated. Altogether, the organization\u00a0appears\u00a0surprisingly\u00a0well-integrated. Most ‘outsiders’ and most weakly-connected \u2018islands\u2019 are either occasional external readers, or new colleagues\u00a0being\u00a0‘socialized’\u00a0into the organization. Obviously, some people are more ‘central’ in the sense of connecting to a more diverse set of\u00a0people, while others\u00a0serve as boundary-spanners reaching…<\/p>\n
Continue readingThe hidden structure of (academic) organizations<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[30,44],"tags":[436,439,455,606],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7g3hj-8z","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":439,"url":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=439","url_meta":{"origin":531,"position":0},"title":"New tool for discourse network analysis","date":"April 11, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"EJPR has just published an article introducing a new tool for 'discourse network analysis'. Using the tool, you can measure and visualize political discourses and the networks of actors affiliated to each discourse. One can study the actor congruence networks (based on the number of statements actors share), concept congruence\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Data visualization"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/discourse-network.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":180,"url":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=180","url_meta":{"origin":531,"position":1},"title":"Predicting the votes of judges","date":"November 29, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Here is a (short) and interesting paper that uses an innovative approach to predict the votes of the US Supreme Court: Successful attempts to predict judges' votes shed light into how legal decisions are made and, ultimately, into the behavior and evolution of the judiciary. Here, we investigate to what\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bayesian methods"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":88,"url":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=88","url_meta":{"origin":531,"position":2},"title":"Concentration of control in the global economy","date":"October 20, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"All\u00a0conspiracy theorists know that the global economy is concentrated in the hands of a few. But even they will be blown away by this paper which maps the network of global corporate ownership and control. Here is the (somewhat understated) abstract: \"The structure of the control network of transnational corporations\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "economic policy"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":547,"url":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=547","url_meta":{"origin":531,"position":3},"title":"Network visualization in R with the igraph package","date":"November 5, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"In this post I showed a visualization of the organizational network of my department. Since several people asked for details how the plot has been produced, I will provide the code and some extensions below. The plot has been done entirely in R (2.14.01) with the help of the igraph\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Data visualization"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/org_network2.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":486,"url":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=486","url_meta":{"origin":531,"position":4},"title":"Facebook does randomized experiments to study social interactions","date":"June 15, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Facebook has a Data Science Team. And here is what they do: Eytan Bakshy [...] wanted to learn whether our actions on Facebook are mainly influenced by those of our close friends, who are likely to have similar tastes. [...] So he messed with how Facebook operated for a quarter\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Advertising research"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":662,"url":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=662","url_meta":{"origin":531,"position":5},"title":"Hyperlinks","date":"January 30, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"After a not-so-short hiatus during which I visited friends and family in Bulgaria, went through a couple of seasonal colds, and got a new workstation up and running (MacBook Pro with W7), I am finally back to the blog. As a warm-up, a bunch of interesting links you might have\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Hyperlinks"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/coral-2.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/social-network-bsk1.jpg\" "\\"social")
<\/a><\/p>\n