Forbidden triads and Creative Success in Jazz: The Miles Davis Factor

This article argues for the importance of forbidden triads - open triads with high-weight edges - in predicting success in creative fields. Forbidden triads had been treated as a residual category beyond closed and open triads, yet I argue that these structures provide opportunities to combine socially evolved styles in new ways. Using data on the entire history of recorded jazz from 1896 to 2010, I show that observed collaborations have tolerated the openness of high weight triads more than expected, observed jazz sessions had more forbidden triads than expected, and the density of forbidden triads contributed to the success of recording sessions, measured by the number of record releases of session material. The article also shows that the sessions of Miles Davis had received an especially high boost from forbidden triads

Dis-embedded Openness: Inequalities in European Economic Integration at the Sectoral Level

The process of European integration resulted in a marked increase in transnational economic flows, yet regional inequalities along many developmental indicators remain. We analyze the unevenness of European economies with respect to the embedding of export sectors in upstream domestic flows, and their dependency on dominant export partners. We use the WIOD data set of sectoral flows for the period of 1995-2011 for 24 European countries. We found that East European economies were significantly more likely to experience increasing unevenness and dependency with increasing openness, while core countries of Europe managed to decrease their unevenness while increasing their openness. Nevertheless, by analyzing the trajectories of changes for each country, we see that East European countries are also experiencing a turning point, either switching to a path similar to the core, or to a retrograde path with decreasing openness. We analyze our data using pooled time series models and case studies of country trajectories

Gendered behavior as a disadvantage in open source software development

Women are severely marginalized in software development, especially in open source. In this article we argue that disadvantage is more due to gendered behavior than to categorical discrimination: women are at a disadvantage because of what they do, rather than because of who they are. Using data on entire careers of users from GitHub.com, we develop a measure to capture the gendered pattern of behavior: We use a random forest prediction of being female (as opposed to being male) by behavioral choices in the level of activity, specialization in programming languages, and choice of partners. We test differences in success and survival along both categorical gender and the gendered pattern of behavior. We find that 84.5% of women's disadvantage (compared to men) in success and 34.8% of their disadvantage in survival are due to the female pattern of their behavior. Men are also disadvantaged along their interquartile range of the female pattern of their behavior, and users who don't reveal their gender suffer an even more drastic disadvantage in survival probability. Moreover, we do not see evidence for any reduction of these inequalities in time. Our findings are robust to noise in gender recognition, and to taking into account particular programming languages, or decision tree classes of gendered behavior. Our results suggest that fighting categorical gender discrimination will have a limited impact on gender inequalities in open source software development, and that gender hiding is not a viable strategy for women

Inclusion unlocks the creative potential of gender diversity in teams

Diversity in teams can boost creativity, and gender diversity was shown to be a contributor to collective creativity. We show that gender diversity requires inclusion to lead to benefits in creativity by analyzing teams in 4011 video game projects. Recording data on the weighted network from past collaborations, we developed four measures of inclusion, depending on a lack of segregation, strong ties across genders, and the incorporation of women into the core of the team s network. We found that gender diversity without inclusion does not contribute to creativity, while with maximal inclusion one standard deviation change in diversity results in .04 to .09 standard deviation change in creativity, depending on the measure of inclusion. To reap creative benefits of diversity, developer firms need to include 23 percent or more female developers (as opposed to the 15 percent mean female proportion) and include them in the team along all dimensions. Inclusion at low diversity has a negative effect. By analyzing the sequences of diversity and inclusion across games within firms, we found that adding diversity first, and developing inclusion later can lead to higher diversity and inclusion, compared to adding female developers with already existing cross-gender ties to the team

Pathways of Property Transformation: Enterprise Network Careers in Hungary, 1988-2000: Outline of an Analytic Strategy

This study analyzes the restructuring of a national economy by identifying the career pathways of its enterprises. This analysis is conducted in a setting strategically chosen as a case of rapid and profound economic transformation: the post-socialist Hungarian economy between 1988-2000. The goal of this study is to chart the multiple pathways of property transformation. Property pathways are conceptualized as the patterned sequences of change that firms undergo 1) in the composition of their ownership structure and 2) in their position within network structures of ties to other enterprises. These career pathways are neither unidirectional nor plotted in advance. The landscape and topography of the socioeconomic field are given shape and repeatedly transformed by the interaction of the multiple strategies of firms attempting to survive in the face of variable political, institutional, and market uncertainties. These different types of uncertainties will have different temporalities, and the study explores whether and how they increase or diminish in various periods. The authors develop and test specific hypotheses about how enterprise pathways along the compositional and positional property dimensions are related to the shifting contexts of these types of uncertainty. The core dataset for this study includes the complete ownership histories of approximately 1,800 of the largest enterprises in Hungary for a twelve year period, starting with the collapse of communism in 1989, recording each change in a company's top 25 owners on a monthly basis. Monthly entries for each enterprise also include changes in top management, boards of directors, major lines of product activity, raising or lowering of capital, and location of establishments and branch offices, as well as the dates of founding, mergers, bankruptcy, etc. Data on revenues, number of employees, and operating profit will be compiled from annual balance sheets. These rich data make it possible to map the life cycles of the business groups that are formed by network ties among enterprises, identifying not only when they arise, merge, or dissipate, but also the changing shapes of their network properties. To identify patterns of change, the study draws on sequence analysis, a research tool that makes possible the study of historical processes in an eventful way similar to historiography while retaining social scientific abstraction. Whereas sequence analysis has given us a perspective on careers as historical processes but has not been applied to business organizations, network analysis has been applied to business organizations but has not been done historically. The methodological innovation at the heart of this study is to combine the tools of sequence analysis and network analysis to yield a sequence analysis of changing network positions

Global Links, Local Roots: Varieties of Transnationalization and Forms of Civic Integration

In a rapidly changing society such as post-socialist Hungary, are civic organizations that are connected to transnational flows of information, resources, and partnership more likely to be disconnected from their membership base, from other civic organizations, and from other organizations outside the civic sector? Do transnational interactions come at the expense of domestic integration? To answer these questions, the authors conducted a survey of 1,002 civic associations in Hungary in 2002. We identify seven varieties of transnationalization and we distinguish three forms of domestic integration—participation, embededdness, and associativeness. Our findings indicate that civic actors do not face a necessarily forced choice between networks of global reach and those of domestic integration. Many Hungarian civic organizations, in significant numbers, do engage in transnational interactions while simultaneously integrated with their membership base, other civic organizations, and/or other non-civic organizations. In fact, the richest and most encompassing patterns of integration go hand in hand with the deepest and most encompassing patterns of transnationalization. These and related findings indicate that it would be mistaken to assume that transnationalization is necessarily accompanied by the domestic uprooting of civic organizations, whether as cause or as consequence

Does crowdfunding really foster innovation? Evidence from the board game industry

Crowdfunding offers inventors and entrepreneurs alternative access to resources with which they can develop and realize their ideas. Besides helping to secure capital, crowdfunding also connects creators with engaged early supporters who provide public feedback. But does this process foster truly innovative outcomes? Does the proliferation of crowdfunding in an industry make it more innovative overall? Prior studies investigating the link between crowdfunding and innovation do not compare traditional and crowdfunded products and so while claims that crowdfunding supports innovation are theoretically sound, they lack empirical backing. We address this gap using a unique dataset of board games, an industry with significant crowdfunding activity in recent years. Each game is described by how it combines fundamental mechanisms such as dice-rolling, negotiation, and resource-management, from which we develop quantitative measures of innovation in game design. Using these measures to compare games, we find that crowdfunded games tend to be more distinctive from previous games than their traditionally published counterparts. They are also significantly more likely to implement novel combinations of mechanisms. Crowdfunded games are not just transient experiments: subsequent games imitate their novel ideas. These results hold in regression models controlling for game and designer-level confounders. Our findings demonstrate that the innovative potential of crowdfunding goes beyond individual products to entire industries, as new ideas spill over to traditionally funded products

Disruptive Diversity and Recurring Cohesion: Assembling Creative Teams in the Video Game Industry, 1979-2009

To test the proposition that a high level of recurring cohesion and a high level of stylistic diversity can combine for successful team performance, this study constructs a dataset of the careers of 139,727 individuals who participated in project teams producing 16,507 video games between 1979 and 2009. Findings indicate that teams with more dissimilar stylistic experiences outperform teams with more homogenous backgrounds, but only for higher levels of recurring cohesion. Teams with high diversity and high social cohesion are better able to harmonize the noisy cacophony of an (otherwise) excessive plurality of voices, thereby exploiting the potential beneficial effects of cognitive diversity