Topological analysis of longitudinal networks

Longitudinal networks evolve over time through the addition or deletion of nodes and edges. A longitudinal network can be viewed as a single static network that aggregates all edges observed over some time period (i.e., structure of network is fixed), or as a series of static networks observed in different point of time over the entire network observation period (i.e., structure of network is changing over time). By following a topological approach (i.e., static topology and dynamic topology), this paper first proposes a framework to analyze longitudinal networks. In static topology, SNA methods are applied to the aggregated network of entire observation period. Smaller segments of network data (i.e., short-interval network) that are accumulated in less time compared to the entire network observation period are used in dynamic topology for analysis purpose. Based on this framework, this study then conducts a topological analysis of email communication networks of an organization during its different operational conditions to explore changes in the behavior of actor-level dynamics. © 2012 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

'Gatekeepers' of Islamic financial circuits : analysing urban geographies of the global Shari'a elite

This paper analyses the importance of 'Shari'a scholars' in the Islamic Financial Services (IFS) sector, which has been a growing global practice since the 1970s. Based on Shari'a Law, IFS firms provide banking, finance and insurance respecting faith-based prohibitions on interest, speculation and risk taking. Although IFS firms operate across a variety of scales and involve a range of actors, this paper focuses on the transnational capacities of Shari'a experts employed by IFS firms. These scholars use their extensive knowledge of Shari'a Law to assess the 'Islamic' character of a firm's operations, and assist the development of Shari'a-compliant products. As they embody necessary entry-points into Islamic circuits of knowledge and authority, members of what we dub the 'global Shari'a elite' can be regarded as 'gatekeepers' of Islamic financial circuits. Drawing on a comprehensive data source we present a geographical analysis of Shari'a board membership, nationality and educational background of 253 Shari'a scholars. The results show that the global Shari'a elite connects a limited number of IFS hubs (e. g. Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Kuwait City, Manama, and London) to knowledge and authority networks falling outside 'mainstream' business and service spheres

Network centrality and organizational aspirations: A behavioral interaction in the context of international strategic alliances

Whereas social network analysis has been associated with organizational aspirations, little is known on how firm's structural positioning, and particularly network centrality, affects organizational aspirations to engage in international strategic alliances (ISA). This study examines the impact of network centrality on firm's internationalization behavior within the ISA domain in response to the performance-aspiration gap. We build on social and behavioral perspectives to predict that network centrality and performance-based aspirations will be associated with the number of ISA the firm engages in. Using a sample of 7760 alliance collaborations from the top 81 global pharmaceutical firms for the period of 1991-2012, we find supporting evidence for most of our arguments

Describing and understanding team integration in new product development : a case study

Mémoire en recherche par le designÉtant donné que les problèmes en développement de produits sont de plus en plus complexes et difficiles à résoudre, le rôle des designers est en changement continu. Ils sont de plus en plus impliqués dans les équipes multi-disciplinaires dès le début d’un projet. Des compagnies adoptent une approche de travail d’équipe qui réunit plusieurs bases de connaissances (disciplines, expertises) différentes dans un seul groupe. Tandis que ces groupes donnent accès à plusieurs bases de connaissances différentes, les membres de l’équipe doivent surmonter le défi de communiquer, négocier et développer une compréhension partagée des objectifs à travers leurs raisonnements différents et parfois opposés. En tant que designer junior, ces dynamiques peuvent intimider, puis faire le pont entre les points de vue différents peut paraître difficile. Afin d’améliorer l’intégration dans une équipe, une réflexion sur les dynamiques mêmes est nécessaire, mais il semble y avoir peu de moyens pour bien expliquer les interactions. Cette recherche se penche donc sur la question de comment décrire et mieux comprendre l’intégration dans une équipe en tant que designer nouvellement impliqué dans un projet et une équipe multi-disciplinaire. Afin d’y répondre, cette recherche créé d’abord un cadre théorique centré sur l’implication d’un designer dans le processus, la gestion de la complexité, le travail en équipe, puis l’intégration efficace à travers le développement d’une compréhension partagée. Une étude de cas qualitative est menée par une approche nommée Research-through-Design (recherche par le design dans le contexte d’un projet) qui permet de jouer le double rôle de chercheur et designer. La collecte de données se fait surtout par journal de bord et observations participantes afin de documenter les actions et réflexions d’un designer qui s’implique dans une équipe multi-disciplinaire menant des projets de développement de nouveaux produits. D’après les données recueillies, cette recherche tente décrire et mieux comprendre le cas en utilisant les catégorisations empiriques des facteurs qui influencent le développement d’une compréhension partagée proposées par Kleinsmann, Valkenburg et Buijs (2007). Grâce à ce cadre d’analyse, la description et réflexion sur l’intégration dans l’équipe furent un succès. Toutefois, cette recherche propose quelques précisions au cadre d’analyse ayant pour but d’y améliorer et faciliter l’observation, la description et la réflexion sur les dynamiques d’équipe pour des futurs designers juniors. Cette recherche espère donc proposer un appui aux designers pour développer leurs compétences à mieux travailler en équipes multi- disciplinaires.As new product development continues to change, designers appear increasingly involved in multi- disciplinary teams from the outset of project inception. This is due to the progressively challenging, multifaceted, and complex problems design must resolve. After all, no single individual possesses the knowledge to create most new products. Companies depend on the teamwork of individuals with different knowledge bases who come together as a single design group. In breaking down silos and creating these integrated teams, overall effectiveness is threatened by their ability to communicate, negotiate, and develop a shared understanding of their goals and means of achieving them. As a junior designer, team dynamics can be intimidating. Bridging different and sometimes conflicting individual views is challenging. Tougher still is reflecting on and describing dynamics as they happen in practice. Without the ability to explain dynamics, identifying and improving team integration seems nearly impossible. As such, this research aims to address these constraints by finding a way to describe and better understand team integration in action. To accomplish this, a theoretical framework is developed to explore designer involvement, managing complexity, teamwork, and effective team integration. From this, a qualitative case study is conducted to reflect on teamwork in action using a Research-through-Design approach. This places design practice in the centre of research and allows the researcher to also play the role of a newly integrated designer. It relies extensively on journal entries and participative observations in order to create a story of designer involvement in new product development. In interpreting the data through an empirical categorisation of factors that are said to influence the development of a shared understanding (Kleinsmann, Valkenburg, & Buijs, 2007), a working description and reflection of team integration was achieved. In addition, this research proposes some amendments that aim to improve the framework and enable other junior designers to better observe, describe, and reflect on team dynamics in the future. This research therefore hopes to contribute by supporting designers in improving their ability to work effectively within multi-disciplinary new product development teams

Mining Time-aware Actor-level Evolution Similarity for Link Prediction in Dynamic Network

Topological evolution over time in a dynamic network triggers both the addition and deletion of actors and the links among them. A dynamic network can be represented as a time series of network snapshots where each snapshot represents the state of the network over an interval of time (for example, a minute, hour or day). The duration of each snapshot denotes the temporal scale/sliding window of the dynamic network and all the links within the duration of the window are aggregated together irrespective of their order in time. The inherent trade-off in selecting the timescale in analysing dynamic networks is that choosing a short temporal window may lead to chaotic changes in network topology and measures (for example, the actors’ centrality measures and the average path length); however, choosing a long window may compromise the study and the investigation of network dynamics. Therefore, to facilitate the analysis and understand different patterns of actor-oriented evolutionary aspects, it is necessary to define an optimal window length (temporal duration) with which to sample a dynamic network. In addition to determining the optical temporal duration, another key task for understanding the dynamics of evolving networks is being able to predict the likelihood of future links among pairs of actors given the existing states of link structure at present time. This phenomenon is known as the link prediction problem in network science. Instead of considering a static state of a network where the associated topology does not change, dynamic link prediction attempts to predict emerging links by considering different types of historical/temporal information, for example the different types of temporal evolutions experienced by the actors in a dynamic network due to the topological evolution over time, known as actor dynamicities. Although there has been some success in developing various methodologies and metrics for the purpose of dynamic link prediction, mining actor-oriented evolutions to address this problem has received little attention from the research community. In addition to this, the existing methodologies were developed without considering the sampling window size of the dynamic network, even though the sampling duration has a large impact on mining the network dynamics of an evolutionary network. Therefore, although the principal focus of this thesis is link prediction in dynamic networks, the optimal sampling window determination was also considered

‘Gatekeepers’ of Islamic financial circuits: Analysing urban geographies of the global Shari’a elite

This paper analyses the importance of 'Shari'a scholars' in the Islamic Financial Services (IFS) sector, which has been a growing global practice since the 1970s. Based on Shari'a Law, IFS firms provide banking, finance and insurance respecting faith-based prohibitions on interest, speculation and risk taking. Although IFS firms operate across a variety of scales and involve a range of actors, this paper focuses on the transnational capacities of Shari'a experts employed by IFS firms. These scholars use their extensive knowledge of Shari'a Law to assess the 'Islamic' character of a firm's operations, and assist the development of Shari'a-compliant products. As they embody necessary entry-points into Islamic circuits of knowledge and authority, members of what we dub the 'global Shari'a elite' can be regarded as 'gatekeepers' of Islamic financial circuits. Drawing on a comprehensive data source we present a geographical analysis of Shari'a board membership, nationality and educational background of 253 Shari'a scholars. The results show that the global Shari'a elite connects a limited number of IFS hubs (e. g. Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Kuwait City, Manama, and London) to knowledge and authority networks falling outside 'mainstream' business and service spheres

Resilience and agency in mature sustainability transitions. Theoretical conceptualisation and empirical analysis of actor- & system-level dynamics in sociotechnical energy systems

In Switzerland, Germany and Austria, as in many European countries, the transition of the energy sector towards more sustainability is a long-term transition process, unfolding since decades. It however only reached the regime level in recent years and therewith the established technologies and governance structures of the energy systems. This fundamental transition process causes complex, interrelated and non-linear dynamics and changes on multiple scales in the technical and social sphere of the energy systems. The energy transition, thus, became a mature sustainability transition, which is a new challenge for research and decision-making in practice. This dissertation contributes to an improved conceptual and empirical understanding of actor- and system-level structures and dynamics in mature sustainability transitions. To tackle this research aim, the dissertation employed an iterative theory building process, which develops theoretical considerations based on preexisting theories and frameworks as well as empirical evidence. The empirical analyses were thereby conducted using a mixed methods approach, which allowed for rich empirical evidence and triangulation. The research was implemented in four modules, whereby each module tackled one research question. Main data sources were scholarly literature, regional structural data and documents as well as transcripts from several rounds of semi-structured expert interviews and expert workshops. The empirical data stemmed from three cases: energy regions in Austria and Germany, a network of change agents in Germany and urban utility companies in Germany and Switzerland. The main analytical methods, employed in this dissertation were qualitative literature analysis, document analysis and structuring qualitative content analysis. For the analysis of system structure for functionality and transition dynamics, this dissertation presents an indicator set to analyse and measure resilience of sociotechnical energy systems in transition, based on the key system characteristics of diversity and connectivity. The empirical application provided rich insights on the sociotechnical system structure and its changes over time and discusses appropriate methods for the empirical analysis. For the analysis of transition dynamics, this dissertation provides a reconceptualised framework for the systematic analysis of actor- and system-level determinants of agency as well as the feedback of agency on the system. Especially focusing on the role of incumbents in mature sustainability transitions, the dissertation moreover provides findings from the empirical exploration of urban utility companies and derived analytical perspectives for public incumbent actors in network industries in transition. The dissertation finally discusses the integrability of conceptual findings to transition studies and presents an integrated framework to analyse structures and dynamics in mature sustainability transitions. The thesis provided key theoretical and empirical insights on actor- and system-level aspects of mature sustainability transitions in sociotechnical energy systems. It contributed to a further discussion on dynamic resilience concepts for sociotechnical energy systems, a more systematic analysis of agency in sustainability transitions and a more nuanced picture of incumbents' agency in sociotechnical energy systems in mature sustainability transitions

Dynamic brokerage across socio-cognitive boundaries : external boundary spanners in South African agribusiness

Extant brokerage literature is teeming with explanations of brokerage across structural holes (open networks), but lean on the accounting for brokerage opportunities in closed networks. Predominantly, brokerage is presented as a structural construct and brokerage opportunities that exhibit temporal dependencies are not easy to explain using extant literature. The explanation of the dynamic properties of brokerage, such as the ability of brokers to adjust their roles as the network context changes, is eschewed. This study introduces the concept of boundary spanner brokerage and defines a dynamic construct, that is able explicate temporal adjustments to brokerage roles as a consequence of cognition in the social environment. The South African agribusiness sector presents an ideal opportunity for the exploration of this phenomenon. The network environment is characterised by small-world networks that impose cognitive boundaries between established white agribusiness and emerging black farmers. Building relationships across these socio-cognitive boundaries is a challenge for emerging agribusiness. Traditional brokerage methods have failed, but cases of successful boundary spanner brokerage have been reported. The expectation that such brokerage could be a silver bullet, for the sustainable connection of emerging agribusiness to industry value networks is, a motivation for this study. Applying a contextualist perspective, the research design considers change dynamics at network, process and actor levels. Social network scholarship posits that any study of network change should consider the interconnectedness of context, action and change, hence the study of microfoundations of network change and in particular, how agency secures on-going brokerage returns. The longitudinal study combines historical and real-time data, spanning the period 2008 to 2018. It relies on 18 semi-structured interviews with business managers, board members and senior members of partner organisations, as well as news media reports and previous academic studies. A necessary complement to the research design is that of ethnographic observation. It allows the phenomenon of boundary spanner brokerage to be studied in its environmental contextThesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2019.Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS)PhDUnrestricte

A Comparative Case Study of Hospital Mergers in England and Ontario: Dynamics of Interaction between Government Agencies and Other Group Actors.

This is a comparative case study of public sector hospital mergers in England and Ontario in the 1990s. Its purpose is to explore how change evolved and the organisational consequences as the hospitals underwent restructuring. The main focus is on the consultation process prior to the decision to merge. The objectives of this work were to analyse the interaction of government agencies and key stakeholders (as defined) in the period leading up to the merger and to track the restructuring process to determine if a new organisational form emerged. Multiple sources of data were collected and collectively the data spanned 19 years for both cases. The researcher conducted 79 interviews in 24 different hospitals and health care organisations over a period of 5 years. The researcher draws on archetype theory and Neil Fligstein's work on power and the social skill of actors to construct a framework for analysis. Archetype theory focuses on intra-organisational dynamics of change and is useful for analysing the emergence of new or hybrid organisational archetypes, but does not focus on the role of external power and politics in the change process. Fligstein's work emphasises the importance of power and how actors may induce co-operation in others to influence and manipulate the change process. The results of this research show that in similar market contexts there were significant differences (in the pre-merger review and consultation processes and in the organisational outcomes) between change that was 'stakeholder-led' and change that was led by government agencies. These merger types can be distinguished in terms of three distinct but closely related factors: the government's approach to consultation with stakeholders; the power dynamics and interaction between key stakeholders during both the consultation process and the post-merger restructuring process; and the extent of manipulation of any of those processes by government agencies