Social network analysis in organizational studies

There has been an increasing interest in organization theory field towards network theory and methodology during the recent years. Academy of Management Review which is one of the most important journals in this field published a special issue concerning the organizational networks. Social embeddedness theory of Granovetter (1985) can be seen as a milestone for the widespread usage of social network methodology in the field of economics and management. Network research methodology has gained importance to measure the social capital of the organizations (Bordieu, 1983 and Coleman, 1988) for understanding institutional effects in an organizational field (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Galaskiewicz and Wasserman, 1989) and to map resource dependency relations between organizations (Pfefer and Salancik, 1978). Networks research methodology can also be used to determine some micro issues in organizations like coalition groups, cliques, social capital formation tendency of the actors. The purpose of this study is to provide information to the potential researchers about basic aspects of social network theory, usage areas in organizational research field, data collection, data entry, measurement items, data analysis and software tools for analyzing social networks.

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Social network analysis ,

Organizations ,

Social capital ,