MEJ Newman publications http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/pubs.html Introduction to stochastic actor-based models for network dynamics: http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~snijders/SnijdersVandeBuntSteglich2010.

pdf Communities, modules and large-scale structure in networks: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/papers/npcommunities.pdf Networks: An Introduction: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/networks-an-introduction/ Mysteries of the Region: Knowledge Dynamics in Silicon Valley John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~duguid/SLOFI/Mysteries_of_the_Region.htm

Actionable knowledge and collective practice

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_organization

The informal organization is the interlocking social structure that governs how people work together in practice. It is the aggregate of behaviors, interactions, norms, personal and professional connections through which work gets done and relationships are built among people who share a common organizational affiliation or cluster of affiliations. It consists of a dynamic set of personal relationships, social networks, communities of common interest, and emotional sources of motivation. The informal organization evolves organically and spontaneously in response to changes in the work environment, the flux of people through its porous boundaries, and the complex social dynamics of its members. Tended effectively, the informal organization complements the more explicit structures, plans, and processes of the formal organization: it can accelerate and enhance responses to unanticipated events, foster innovation, enable people to solve problems that require collaboration across boundaries, and create footpaths showing where the formal organization may someday need to pave a way.

The informal organization and the formal organization

The nature of the informal organization becomes more distinct when its key characteristics are juxtaposed with those of the formal organization. Key characteristics of the informal organization:

evolving constantly grass roots

dynamic and responsive excellent at motivation requires insider knowledge to be seen treats people as individuals flat and fluid cohered by trust and reciprocity difficult to pin down essential for situations that change quickly or are not yet fully understood

Key characteristics of the formal organization:

enduring, unless deliberately altered top-down missionary static excellent at alignment plain to see equates person with role hierarchical bound together by codified rules and order easily understood and explained critical for dealing with situations that are known and consistent

Historically, some have regarded the informal organization as the byproduct of insufficient formal organizationarguing, for example, that it can hardly be questioned that the ideal situation in the business organization would be one where no informal organization existed. [1] However, the contemporary approachone suggested as early as 1925 by Mary Parker Follett, the pioneer of community centers and author of influential works on management philosophyis to integrate the informal organization and the formal organization, recognizing the strengths and limitations of each. Integration, as Follett defined it, means breaking down apparent sources of conflict into their basic elements and then building new solutions that neither allow domination nor require compromise.[2] In other words, integrating the informal organization with the formal organization replaces competition with coherence. At a societal level, the importance of the relationship between formal and informal structures can be seen in the relationship between civil society and state authority. The power of integrating the formal organization and the informal organization can also be seen in many successful businesses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice

A community of practice (CoP) is, according to cognitive anthropologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, a group of people who share a craft and/or a profession. The group can evolve naturally because of the members' common interest in a particular domain or area, or it can be created specifically with the goal of gaining knowledge related to their field. It is through the process of sharing information and experiences with the group that the members learn from each other, and have an opportunity to develop themselves personally and professionally (Lave & Wenger 1991). CoPs can exist online, such as within discussion boards and newsgroups, or in real life, such as in a lunch room at work, in a field setting, on a factory floor, or elsewhere in the environment.

This type of learning practice has existed for as long as people have been learning and sharing their experiences through storytelling. Wenger coined the phrase in his 1998 book, Communities of Practice: learning, meaning and identity.
Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger Cambridge University Press, Sep 27, 1991 - 138 pages In this important theoretical treatise, Jean Lave, anthropologist, and Etienne Wenger, computer scientist, push forward the notion of situated learning--that learning is fundamentally a social process and not solely in the learner's head. The authors maintain that learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process they call legitimate peripheral participation. Learners participate in communities of practitioners, moving toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community. Legitimate peripheral participation provides a way to speak about crucial relations between newcomers and oldtimers and about their activities, identities, artifacts, knowledge and practice. The communities discussed in the book are midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, and recovering alcoholics, however, the process by which participants in those communities learn can be generalized to other social groups.

http://www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm http://www.ewenger.com/theory/ http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml

Social network analysis

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article is about the theoretical concept. For social networking sites, see social networking service. For the 2010 movie, see The Social Network.

A social network diagram displaying friendship ties between a set of Facebook users.

Social network analysis (SNA) is the methodical analysis of social networks. Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of network theory consisting of nodes (representing individual actors within the network) and connections or links (which represent relationships between the individuals, such as friendship, kinship, organizational position, sexual relationships, etc.)[1][2] These networks are often depicted in a social network diagram, where nodes are the points and ties are the lines.

Overview
Where traditional social scientific studies assume that it is the attributes of individual actors that matter, social network analysis focuses on the relationships and ties between actors within the network.[3][4] Social network analysis (related to network theory) has emerged as a key technique in modern sociology. It has also gained a significant following in anthropology, biology, communication studies, economics, geography, information science, organizational studies, social psychology, and sociolinguistics, and has become a popular topic of speculation and study. People have used the idea of "social network" loosely for over a century to connote complex sets of relationships between members of social systems at all scales, from interpersonal to

international. In 1954, J. A. Barnes started using the term systematically to denote patterns of ties, encompassing concepts traditionally used by the public and those used by social scientists: bounded groups (e.g., tribes, families) and social categories (e.g., gender, ethnicity). Scholars such as S.D. Berkowitz, Stephen Borgatti, Ronald Burt, Kathleen Carley, Martin Everett, Katherine Faust, Linton Freeman, Mark Granovetter, David Knoke, David Krackhardt, Peter Marsden, Nicholas Mullins, Anatol Rapoport, Stanley Wasserman, Barry Wellman, Douglas R. White, and Harrison White expanded the use of systematic social network analysis.[5] Social networks have also been used to examine how organizations interact with each other, characterizing the many informal connections that link executives together, as well as associations and connections between individual employees at different organizations. For example, power within organizations often comes more from the degree to which an individual within a network is at the center of many relationships than actual job title. Social networks also play a key role in hiring, in business success, and in job performance. Networks provide ways for companies to gather information, deter competition, and collude in setting prices or policies.[6]