148,189 research outputs found
Conceptualizing Social Capital as Access to Social Network and Mobilization of Network Resources: A Study of Workplace Literacy Programs and Low-income Somali Refugee Workers
There is a substantial body of literature on the economic benefits of workplace literacy programs, and much less empirical studies on the social or non-economic outcomes of workplace literacy programs, particularly in the context of low-income refugee workers. Adopting a social network approach, this study examines the impact of workplace literacy programs on the social capital development of Somali refugee workers. Social capital can be defined as the network of relationships possessed by an individual or social group that facilitates their access to emotional, instrumental, or informational resources, essential for their daily survival, stability, or upward mobility. This study takes the position that literacy development is a socially situated and contextualized set of practices which impact the structure of an individual’s social network. Thereby, creating access to certain types of social resources –emotional, instrumental and informational – that can be used for the good of the individual. Data were drawn using interviews with eighteen participants enrolled in a workplace literacy program and had attended classes for at least three months. The classes offered included ESL, GED and Citizenship. The interview protocol was designed using a hybrid (name and resource) generator instrument.
First, we examined how participating in classes impacted the structure of participant’s social networks by measuring (i) the size of the social network, and (ii) strength of the ties in social network. Next, we examined the types of social capital resources that accrue to low income Somali refugee workers through their networks acquired as a result of participating in classes. The findings revealed that participation in classes had a positive impact on their network structure, through the acquisition of strong ties with co-workers, and weak ties with teachers and supervisors. This created access to emotional, instrumental and informational resources that participants previously did not have access to and consequently enhanced their social capital development. Moreover, mobilizing social capital resources through strong ties with co-workers would have been difficult or impossible in the absence of specific mechanisms, which we identified as motivation, trust and reciprocity
Exploring the Organizational Effects of Directors\u27 Embeddedness in Board Networks
In this dissertation, I explore how top executives’ and directors’ embeddedness in corporate elite networks within and between organizations’ boards of directors influence organizational strategy and policy. In the first study, I conduct a comprehensive review of the governance literature using both a traditional narrative approach as well as a bibliometric main path analysis, which traces the development and diffusion of scholarly knowledge on corporate elite networks. In the second study, drawing from network theory and behavioral governance research, I introduce a methodology that allows researchers to model intraboard networks by measuring the strength of ties among members of boards of directors based on objective formative indicators of the constructs of social similarity, social status, social exchange, and social history. Next, I use this technique to explore the antecedents and consequences of intraorganizational network characteristics of boards. Finally, in the third study, I examine the joint influence of interlocking directorates and intraorganizational networks of boards of directors on interorganizational imitation of corporate strategic activity. Results show that directors’ centrality within a focal organization’s board and those of its alters are important predictors of interorganizational imitation of corporate strategic activity. I contribute to the strategic management and organization theory literatures by advancing our understanding of the relationship of corporate elite networks with organizational strategy and policy, and by introducing a new approach to modeling directors’ networks in corporate governance research
Improving Link Prediction in Intermittently Connected Wireless Networks by Considering Link and Proximity Stabilities
Several works have outlined the fact that the mobility in intermittently
connected wireless networks is strongly governed by human behaviors as they are
basically human-centered. It has been shown that the users' moves can be
correlated and that the social ties shared by the users highly impact their
mobility patterns and hence the network structure. Tracking these correlations
and measuring the strength of social ties have led us to propose an efficient
distributed tensor-based link prediction technique. In fact, we are convinced
that the feedback provided by such a prediction mechanism can enhance
communication protocols such as opportunistic routing protocols. In this paper,
we aim to bring out that measuring the stabilities of the link and the
proximity at two hops can improve the efficiency of the proposed link
prediction technique. To quantify these two parameters, we propose an entropy
estimator in order to measure the two stability aspects over successive time
periods. Then, we join these entropy estimations to the tensor-based link
prediction framework by designing new prediction metrics. To assess the
contribution of these entropy estimations in the enhancement of tensor-based
link prediction efficiency, we perform prediction on two real traces. Our
simulation results show that by exploiting the information corresponding to the
link stability and/or to the proximity stability, the performance of the
tensor-based link prediction technique is improved. Moreover, the results
attest that our proposal's ability to outperform other well-known prediction
metrics.Comment: Published in the proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Symposium
on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM), San
Francisco, United States, 201
Attention on Weak Ties in Social and Communication Networks
Granovetter's weak tie theory of social networks is built around two central
hypotheses. The first states that strong social ties carry the large majority
of interaction events; the second maintains that weak social ties, although
less active, are often relevant for the exchange of especially important
information (e.g., about potential new jobs in Granovetter's work). While
several empirical studies have provided support for the first hypothesis, the
second has been the object of far less scrutiny. A possible reason is that it
involves notions relative to the nature and importance of the information that
are hard to quantify and measure, especially in large scale studies. Here, we
search for empirical validation of both Granovetter's hypotheses. We find clear
empirical support for the first. We also provide empirical evidence and a
quantitative interpretation for the second. We show that attention, measured as
the fraction of interactions devoted to a particular social connection, is high
on weak ties --- possibly reflecting the postulated informational purposes of
such ties --- but also on very strong ties. Data from online social media and
mobile communication reveal network-dependent mixtures of these two effects on
the basis of a platform's typical usage. Our results establish a clear
relationships between attention, importance, and strength of social links, and
could lead to improved algorithms to prioritize social media content
Measuring Tie Strength in Implicit Social Networks
Given a set of people and a set of events they attend, we address the problem
of measuring connectedness or tie strength between each pair of persons given
that attendance at mutual events gives an implicit social network between
people. We take an axiomatic approach to this problem. Starting from a list of
axioms that a measure of tie strength must satisfy, we characterize functions
that satisfy all the axioms and show that there is a range of measures that
satisfy this characterization. A measure of tie strength induces a ranking on
the edges (and on the set of neighbors for every person). We show that for
applications where the ranking, and not the absolute value of the tie strength,
is the important thing about the measure, the axioms are equivalent to a
natural partial order. Also, to settle on a particular measure, we must make a
non-obvious decision about extending this partial order to a total order, and
that this decision is best left to particular applications. We classify
measures found in prior literature according to the axioms that they satisfy.
In our experiments, we measure tie strength and the coverage of our axioms in
several datasets. Also, for each dataset, we bound the maximum Kendall's Tau
divergence (which measures the number of pairwise disagreements between two
lists) between all measures that satisfy the axioms using the partial order.
This informs us if particular datasets are well behaved where we do not have to
worry about which measure to choose, or we have to be careful about the exact
choice of measure we make.Comment: 10 page
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Research Collaboration Analysis Using Text and Graph Features
Patterns of scientific collaboration and their effect on scientific production have been the subject of many studies. In this paper we analyze the nature of ties between co-authors and study collaboration patterns in science from the perspective of semantic similarity of authors who wrote a paper together and the strength of ties between these authors (i.e. how much have they previously collaborated together). These two views of scientific collaboration are used to analyze publications in the TrueImpactDataset [11], a new dataset containing two types of publications - publications regarded as seminal and publications regarded as literature reviews by field experts. We show there are distinct differences between seminal publications and literature reviews in terms of author similarity and the strength of ties between their authors. In particular, we find that seminal publications tend to be written by authors who have previously worked on dissimilar problems (i.e. authors from different fields or even disciplines), and by authors who are not frequent collaborators. On the other hand, literature reviews in our dataset tend to be the result of an established collaboration within a discipline. This demonstrates that our method provides meaningful information about potential future impacts of a publication which does not require citation information
On Facebook, most ties are weak
Pervasive socio-technical networks bring new conceptual and technological
challenges to developers and users alike. A central research theme is
evaluation of the intensity of relations linking users and how they facilitate
communication and the spread of information. These aspects of human
relationships have been studied extensively in the social sciences under the
framework of the "strength of weak ties" theory proposed by Mark Granovetter.13
Some research has considered whether that theory can be extended to online
social networks like Facebook, suggesting interaction data can be used to
predict the strength of ties. The approaches being used require handling
user-generated data that is often not publicly available due to privacy
concerns. Here, we propose an alternative definition of weak and strong ties
that requires knowledge of only the topology of the social network (such as who
is a friend of whom on Facebook), relying on the fact that online social
networks, or OSNs, tend to fragment into communities. We thus suggest
classifying as weak ties those edges linking individuals belonging to different
communities and strong ties as those connecting users in the same community. We
tested this definition on a large network representing part of the Facebook
social graph and studied how weak and strong ties affect the
information-diffusion process. Our findings suggest individuals in OSNs
self-organize to create well-connected communities, while weak ties yield
cohesion and optimize the coverage of information spread.Comment: Accepted version of the manuscript before ACM editorial work. Check
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/11/179820-on-facebook-most-ties-are-weak/
for the final versio
Quantifying Triadic Closure in Multi-Edge Social Networks
Multi-edge networks capture repeated interactions between individuals. In
social networks, such edges often form closed triangles, or triads. Standard
approaches to measure this triadic closure, however, fail for multi-edge
networks, because they do not consider that triads can be formed by edges of
different multiplicity. We propose a novel measure of triadic closure for
multi-edge networks of social interactions based on a shared partner statistic.
We demonstrate that our operalization is able to detect meaningful closure in
synthetic and empirical multi-edge networks, where common approaches fail. This
is a cornerstone in driving inferential network analyses from the analysis of
binary networks towards the analyses of multi-edge and weighted networks, which
offer a more realistic representation of social interactions and relations.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures, 6 table
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