The 6th Conference on Applications of Social Networ k Analysis (ASNA 2009) August 27-28, University of Zurich / ETH Zurich

“Expanding networks: New reality or new perspective ?”

Social Network Analysis: A New Perspective for the Post-Fordist Organization

Roberto Dandi Luiss Guido Carli – Faculty of Economics

Viale Pola 12 00198 Rome Italy Phone ++39 06 85222356 Fax ++3

9 06 85222400 Email: rdandi@luiss.it

Alessia Sammarra University of L’Aquila - Faculty of Economics

P.zza del Santuario 19, 67040 Roio Poggio (AQ) Italy Phone ++39 0862 434851 Fax ++39 0862 434803

Email: sammarra@ec.univaq.it

Abstract

Recently, Social Network Analysis (SNA) has emerged has one of the most innovative fields of management research and it is growlingly popular in the business community as well. We claim that one of the reasons for this success is the fact that SNA supports the Post-Fordist model of organization: a relational point of view is actually coherent with the development of teamwork-based, flexible, decentralized, and customer-oriented structures. By analyzing the uses of SNA in management consulting services, we were able to compare and identify the gaps between SNA management research and practice, and to what extent are both supporting a Post-Fordist model of managing and organizing.

1. Introduction: Social Network Analysis and Post-F ordism

The history of modern SNA can be traced back to 1930s when Jacob Moreno first

started to develop “sociometry” as a way to map social relationships in small groups.

Starting from social-psychology, SNA spread, over the decades, across many

disciplines including anthropology, sociology, and organization studies (Borgatti et al.

2009). However, even if the first reviews of the applications of Social Network Analysis

in Organization Science (Tichy et Fombrun 1979; Tichy et al. 1979) are 30 years old,

only in the last 10 years SNA has actually emerged as one of the most innovative and

successful fields of management research. Figure 1 shows distribution over time of 860

articles about Social Network Analysis published in business or economic scholarly

peer-reviewed journals in the last 13 yearsi.

Fig. 1 – Journal articles on social network analysis from 1996 to 2009

18 2130

2435

46 41

58 62

92

114

134126

59

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

Sources: SCOPUS, July 28th 2009

As evident from the picture, SNA has become a major issue in management research

only since mid 2000s. There are several explanations for this late success in

management research. Firstly, only recently relational data are increasingly available to

management researchers, thanks to the digitalization of information. Data from

company websites, computer-mediated communications, news and other online

databases can be accessed and organized in order to extract social networks more

easily now than before. Also new gathering tools, such as web surveys, web scraping,

text analysis, and data mining tools, increasingly facilitate the extraction and

organization of relational data. Secondly, the increasing computer power available to

researchers permits them to process larger amounts of data (and relational data) using

more sophisticated (and memory expensive) algorithms and statistical methods (such

as Exponential Random Graph Models) to analyze larger social networks. Thirdly, SNA

is itself a “social contagion” phenomenon among researchers, partly because its

flexibility. SNA can be applied to many contexts and problems: nodes and relations can

be anything a researcher needs to focus on. In management research nodes can be

people, units, organizations, or networks themselves. Relations may be information,

resource, or knowledge flows and interdependencies. As Monge and Contractor (2003)

have demonstrated, SNA can be the lens through which many already existing

organization science problems and theoretical models can be re-analyzed and

reformulated.

We claim that the increased attention to SNA specifically by management researchers

is also explained by the fact that SNA supports a systemic and post-fordist view of

organizations. Over the last decades there has been a growing pressure on

organizations to move from a command-and-control, silos-based, centralized, and

efficiency-oriented structure (the so called fordist model) to a teamwork-based, flexible,

decentralized, and customer-oriented structure (the so called post-fordist model).

The term ‘fordism’ is commonly used to identify the model of organizing production and

labor that characterized the period from the end of World War II until the mid 1970s.

This model is built on mass production of standardized goods using unflexible,

dedicated machinery, exploitation of scale economies, a Taylorist fragmentation and

deskilling of work, emphasis on formal and vertical coordination mechanisms,

centralization of information and control, clear internal boundaries among specialized

functions and organizational units, clear external boundaries between the organization

and the external environment .

Fordism has been increasingly eroded by new organizational models that stress the role

of interdependence and connectivity beyond and within firm boundaries. While in the

fordist era the dominant model was the vertical integrated large corporation, the

economic crisis of the 70’s has signed the emergence of clusters of firms (Storper &

Harrison, 1991). In the 1970s and 1980s regional clusters of SMEs established a strong

position in the world market for both more traditional products (e.g. Third Italy) and high

technology products (e.g. Silicon Valley). The firms in the clusters form local production

networks, which comprise vertical cooperation with subcontractors and customers

and/or horizontal co-operation between operations on the same level of the production

chain. This organizational model ensures the exploitation of external economies among

firms specialized in various phases of a production chain and the establishment of a

flexible production model where firms depend on the network of subcontractors and

other local firms in dealing with changes in production volume and products/models.

Beyond cluster of SMEs, the shift toward network model of inter-firm coordination has

increasingly involved also large corporations though the use of strategic alliances. In the

last two decades, the number of alliances – defined as voluntary arrangements among

independent firms that entail exchanging, sharing, and jointly developing or providing

products, services, or technologies (Gulati, 1998) – has increased dramatically (Walter,

Lechner and Kellermanns, 2008; Dyer et al., 2001), especially in high-tech industries

such as biotechnology, telecommunications and aerospace. The increasing interest for

these new inter-organizational arrangements – both in the form of regional clusters of

SMEs and strategic/innovation networks among alliance partners – has driven the

application of social network analysis for research and policy purposes. Specifically,

SNA offer the analytical tools to investigate the effect of the structural properties of the

network on performance at firm and cluster/regional levels and, more lately, the

dynamic properties that leads to network formation and evolution.

The network metaphor is also effective to capture the transformations that has occurred

within the firm’s boundaries, with the shift from the traditional bureaucratic model to new

organizational forms (Fulk, 2001; Reich, 1991; Nohria and Eccles, 1992) based on the

concepts of teamwork, knowledge management, empowerment, temporary project

teams. All these concepts share the assumption that the actual relationships – both

formal and informal – that link people in different roles, organizational units,

functions/divisions are key elements that affect the efficiency, quality, and timing of

organizational processes. In this context, SNA offers a new lens to accurately uncover

the social structure of the network relations that connect people within the organization

and to investigate how this structure affects key organizational dimensions. For instance,

Balkundi and Kildurff (2006) propose SNA as a fundamental perspective to advance the

understanding of leadership effectiveness, especially in post-bureaucratic organization.

The shift toward the knowledge economy and knowledge worker has stressed the

importance of analyzing informal relationships and advice networks to understand how

knowledge diffusion and sharing can be enhanced in modern organizations. As a matter

of fact, while information technologies offer efficient knowledge repositories and

instruments that allow people to communicate and exchange information, knowledge

sharing requires a process of learning that occurs through networks of social

relationships (Borgatti and Cross, 2003).

To summarize, the Post-Fordism model, coherently with a network approach, stresses

the importance of: (i) connecting activities through the improvement of cross-hierarchy

(or cross-organizational) business processes; (ii) connecting people through both

leadership, culture, and information and communication technologies; (iii) connecting

experts and non-experts, through the identification, creation, diffusion, and re-use of

knowledge; (iv) connecting suppliers, customers, and partners, as in the so called

“network organization”.

Integrating activities, people, knowledge, and organizations is also the key aim of the

business applications of Social Network Analysis (SNA). SNA includes a set of theories

and techniques that provide different lens for understanding organizations and

potentially for supporting them in the shift towards the Post-Fordist model. For instance,

SNA has been proposed by several SNA scholars as a management tool in human

resource development, knowledge management, marketing, intra and inter-

organizational coordination. An analysis of the content of the publications in SNA

management research can reveal to what extent SNA is investigating these issues, thus

supporting a better understanding of how to implement the Post-Fordist model.

A more difficult task is to understand the use of SNA in the business community. The

use and diffusion of SNA in management practice is in fact still an unexplored field. As

showed in figure 1, SNA is growingly present in the top business magazines such as

Harvard Business Review, BusinessWeek, California Management Review, Harvard

Management Update, Fast Company. However, this trend is supported by very few

publications (we were able to find only 24 articles directly addressed to SNA).

The aims of this study are therefore:

(i) Measuring the extent to which SNA management research addresses its

focus on Post-Fordist issues.

(ii) Exploring the (Post-Fordist) uses of SNA in the business practice though a

survey to companies offering SNA-based management consulting services.

(iii) Identifying gaps between management research and practice, from the view

point of the Post-Fordist model.

2. Methodology

In order to assess the Post-Fordist orientation on management research, we performed

a text analysis of the abstracts of 860 articles published in peer-reviewed business &

management journals available from the database SCOPUS. In note 1 the explanation

of the search process. Since five articles did not present any abstract, they were

excluded from the analysis. The sample is therefore made of 855 abstracts.

The text analysis goal was to select the most important keywords of the entire literature

on management & social networks. We did not analyze the keyword section of each

record provided by the SCOPUS database because: (i) a large amount of records (one

third) did not present any keyword, and (ii) the keywords were not just the ones

provided by the authors but they had been automatically generated by SCOPUS with

some ambiguous results.

The text analysis process was composed of the following steps:

1) Preprocessing. The text had to be standardized in order for us to be able to find the

same concepts even if expressed with different words. For example, the concept of

“communities of practice” can also be expressed as “communities of practice”, “COP”

“COPs”, “networks of practice”, etc. Based on the SCOPUS incomplete and

automatically generated keywords, we created a thesaurus for preprocessing the

keywords in all the 855 abstracts. This preprocessing phase has been carried out

through the text analysis software AUTOMAP, by Kathleen Carley’s team at Center for

Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at Carnagie Mellon

University (Carley & Diesner, 2005).

1) Keyword extraction. Abstracts have been processed through the text analysis

software Crawdad by Crawdad Technologies, LLC, Chandler, AZ (Corman & Dooley,

2007) and through the social network analysis software UCINET, by Analytic

Technologies, Lexington, KY (Borgatti, Everett, & Freeman, 2002). Firstly, we grouped

together the abstract published in each year, thus creating 14 documents. Secondly,

Crawdad extracted the keywords out of the abstracts texts, thus producing a keyword-

by-year matrix. We limited Crawdad to extract the most important 100 keywords from all

the abstracts. Differently from other text analysis tools, Crawdad selects the keywords

according to their betweenness centrality in the text. Betwenness is a proxy of the ability

of a word in connecting other concepts otherwise separated.

2) Keyword selection. Some of the 100 extracted keywords were not directly related to

management concepts and did not provide any information about the content of the

articles thus adding only “rumor” to the analysis. Therefore we eliminated the keywords

which are not associated to a management concept or are too ambiguous, such as:

analysis, application, case, creating, effect, effort, evidence, influence, method, network,

perspective, relation, role, SNA, social, structure, study, system, tool, use. In this way,

we narrowed down the number of keywords to 52.

4) Network analysis and visualization. Through UCINET (affiliation function, Borgatti,

Everett, & Freeman, 2002) we created a keyword-by-keyword network out of the

keyword-by-year network. Then, we performed a core-periphery analysis (Wasserman

and Faust, 1994) of the keyword-by-keyword network in order to identify the most

central keywords in the network. Also we visualized the networks in order to show at

once the development of SNA research. Finally, through Crawdad, we performed the

cluster analysis of the abstracts grouped by years.

As for the management consultancy part of the study, a web survey was designed to

collect data on the actual use of SNA in management practice. The on-line locations

used to post the invitation to participate to the web-survey include SOCNET, the INSNA

(International Network of Social Network Analysis) mailing list, and four thematic virtual

groups devoted to SNA on LinkedIn.com, the most important social networking website

for business relations. The four groups are Braintrust, Social Network Analysis

(www.DegreeCentrality.com), Social Network Analysis in Practice, and Network Effect.

At the time the survey was launched on mid May 2009, SOCNET subscribers were

2,215 while the three LinkedIn groups’ subscribers, taken together, were 1,306.

Furthermore, the invitation to participate in the survey was also sent as an email

message to a list of 70 management consulting companies identified through an internet

search on Google using the key words "social network analysis" "consulting company"

or "management consulting" or "consulting services".

The web-survey included questions on the firm’s general characteristics (size,

nationality, etc.), the years of experience in the application of SNA-based management

consultant services, the areas of application of SNA to management consultant practice

(e.g., knowledge management, marketing, etc.), and the sources of SNA knowledge

and expertise of the firm and its founders. The web-survey required about 10 minutes to

be completed.

Table 1 – Betweenness Centrality of Keywords by period

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 SUMknowledge 1 0 0 2 1 2 3 6 2 7 2 7 4 7 45information 1 2 5 0 1 1 1 3 2 2 1 3 1 1 24technology 0 6 0 1 1 0 1 2 2 2 1 1 1 2 20group 0 1 1 2 4 1 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 18innovation 2 0 1 0 1 2 2 0 1 1 1 1 2 1 16alliance 1 0 1 0 0 4 3 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 15communication 0 0 6 2 0 0 0 3 0 0 1 1 0 2 14change 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 2 1 1 10market 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 9strategy 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 9team 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 2 2 1 1 0 1 0 9policy 4 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 8public 5 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 7product 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 2 1 0 1 0 0 0 7stakeholder 0 2 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 7learning 1 0 0 0 2 2 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 7partner 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 6international 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 2 5capability 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 5power 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 5R&D 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 4infrastructure 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4transaction 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4entrepreneurial 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 4community 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 4informal 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 4coordination 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 3decision 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 3cultural 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3entrepreneur 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 3technological 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 3formal 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3marketing 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 3trust 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 3cooperation 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3integration 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 3collaboration 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 3quality 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 3supply 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 3advice 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 3culture 0 1 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3partnership 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 2cluster 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 2sponsorship 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2virtual 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 2board 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 2skill 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2distributor 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1advertising 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1consortium 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1SCM 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1negotiation 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1

99 organizations responded to the survey. After removing surveys with significant

amounts of incomplete information, there were 86 questionnaires usable for the

analyses. Secondary data were also collected from the websites of the management

consulting companies included in the sample in order to validate and triangulate the

data gathered through the web-survey.

3. Results

3.1 Academic fields of research

The analysis of academic articles about SNA-based research in the management fields

produced the 52 keywords showed in table 1. The keywords are associated to each

period according to their betweenness centrality in the text. They are ordered according

to the overall sum across periods.

By applying the core-periphery analysis to the keyword-by-keyword network we were

able to identify the following “core” concepts (starting fitness: 0.351, final fitness: 0.618):

knowledge, technology, information, group, innovation, communication, alliance, change.

These keywords are also the first 8 in table 2.

Fig. 2 – Keyword by year network, relations greater or equal than 2

In figure 2 we present the keywords with a score of 2 or more by year. As evident

“knowledge” is the most central concept, linking all the years since 1999. The words

“communication”, “information”, and “technology” are central issues in 1997, 2003, 2004,

2005, 2007, 2009. “Group” issues are key in 1999, 2000, 2005, and 2006. “Innovation”

links 1996, 2001, 2002, and 2008. “Alliance” was a central issue in 2001 and 2002,

while “change” mostly in 2007.

3.2 Business fields of application

We developed a survey that we submitted to organizations providing SNA-based

management consulting services. The sample is composed of 86 organizations. There

is a great variance in organization size, ranging from 1 to 120,000 (standard deviation =

17,103). However, as shown in tab. 2, we can say that small enterprises (less than 50

employees) and micro-enterprises (less than 10 employees) dominate the sample (79%

of the respondents).

Table 2 - Sample description: firms distribution by employees size classes (N=86, missing=3)

Employees Firms 1 13 2 - 9 31 10 - 49 22 50 - 249 3 250 - 499 2 500+ 12 m.v. 3 Total 86

The evolution over time of the adoption SNA-based management services is

represented in the following figure 3. The years represents when each organization

started using SNA. The chart confirms that the explosion of SNA, especially in the last

10 years, has involved the business community other than the academic community.

Fig. 3 – Organizations adopting SNA for management consulting over time (n=86, missing=18)

10 0 0 0 0

2

0 0 01

4

1 1 1

5

10

8

13

15

6

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

198919901991199219931994199519961997199819992000200120022003200420052006200720082009

The organizations offer different types of SNA-based services. Figure 4 shows the

percentages of customers receiving SNA-based management consulting in each

category. Knowledge Management is the most frequent field of application, followed by

intra-organizational coordination, innovation, and marketing. Organizations that selected

the “other” category specified some unexpected ways of using SNA for management

consulting: fraud detection and prevention, lobbying, project and program management,

stakeholder management.

Figure 4 – Relevance of SNA areas of application in management consultancies services (n=86,

missing=16)

4. Discussion and conclusions

The study provides evidence that post-fordist issues are central topics in both Social

Network Analysis management research and management practice. In particular we

identified the following concepts:

� Knowledge Management is extensively studied in the SNA-based literature since

“knowledge” is the dominant concept in the last 10 years. In management

practice, 80% of the customers of SNA-based management consultancy

organizations receive knowledge management services.

� Intra-organizational coordination is also an important part of SNA management

research. Keywords like “group”, “communication”, and “information” remind of

ways for coordinating and grouping people. Almost 60% of the clients of SNA-

based management consultancy receive this kind of services.

� Innovation is a multi-faceted concept, since it may concern organizational,

technological, product, or service innovation. In the last years, keywords like

“innovation”, “information”, and “technology” have become highly central in the

management research discourse. About 50% of the clients in the SNA-based

consultancy “industry” receive consulting services in order to improve their

innovation processes.

� Change Management is also very important to organizations receiving SNA-

based services. Coherently, “change” is one of the core keywords in the literature

on SNA-based management research.

� Inter-organizational networks have been extensively analyzed in SNA research,

especially in terms of inter-organizational alliances in the beginning of 2000s.

This is also an important issue for management practice as almost 40% of the

clients receive this kind of consultancy.

� Talent management issues are peripheral both is SNA-based management

research and practice. Potentially, there is room for both more research and

more business in this area.

We were able to find also some gaps between SNA-based management research and

practice.

� In particular the keyword “market”, “marketing”, and “advertising” are in the

periphery region of the SNA-based management literature while organizations

offering consulting services provide SNA-based marketing services to more than

40% of their clients.

� Leadership also has a minor role in SNA-based management research, since no

keyword was extracted on this issue from the 855 article abstracts. This means

that, even if there may be some SNA-based articles citing the words “leader” or

“leadership”, these words have a low betweenness in the text. Leadership is

instead an important issue in management practice, and consulting companies

are already using SNA to support almost 40% of their clients on leadership

issues.

In conclusion, this paper provides new evidence of the diffusion of SNA into different

topics of management research and consultancy that support a post-fordist view of the

organization. However, there are topics that are more researched or consulted than

others.

One explanation is the different availability of quality data among researchers and

consultants. Researchers and consultants in the field of innovation processes may rely

on huge amounts of publicly available secondary data (patents, citations, co-

authorships). News about inter-organizational alliances, joint-ventures, consortia etc.

are also publicized by popular magazines and can be collected as longitudinal data in

databases available to both researchers and consultants. Data about customers and

about the effectiveness of particular marketing strategies can be gathered by

consultants with the approval of client organizations. Data useful for addressing human

resource management issues, instead, need to be gathered through surveys addressed

to employees. Research or consulting projects on leadership and talent management

need sensitive and mostly non-quantitative data to be carried out.

As raised in Borgatti and Molina (2005), one of the main problems of SNA is the lack of

anonymity of respondents. This produces both an ethical and a practical issue. The

ethical problem is that in organizational settings the management that commissioned

the SNA project may take action on the personnel based on the results of SNA. This is

a potential problem with consultants, because they are less trained and supported on

ethical issues than academic researchers (who have to respond to the IRB control in the

US, for example). The practical problem is that the lack of anonymity, and the threat of

consequences, may induce the respondents to insert biased and false answers in the

surveys.

Data about intra-organizational collaboration and knowledge management, however,

need also to be collected through survey and cannot rely exclusively on secondary data.

Despite this, knowledge management and intra-organizational coordination are the most

common applications of SNA both in research and practice. We believe that the reason

is that SNA is the perfect tool for the post-fordist business world.

Scarbrough and Swan (2001) describe the new ‘era’ of post-fordism as “typified by

flatter structures, debureaucratization and ‘virtual’ or networked forms of organization,

[...] with new organizational forms both reflecting and advancing the use of new

information technologies such as ‘groupware’ and intranet applications”. The authors

notice that, in this context, knowledge management can be seen as a response to both

the problems and opportunities created by new ways of organizing. SNA, at the same

time, makes visible the relationships that cannot be represented in an organizational

chart, thus providing a way to analyze, measure, and design new ways of relating

people and resources.

This perspective offers a suitable lens also to explain the increasing appeal of SNA for

management researchers and consultants in knowledge management and intra-

organizational collaboration. In this view, SNA offers response both to the ideological

debate around the concepts of the post-industrial society and post-fordist production

models as well as the increasing need to organize, quantify and valorize social

relationships to address problems of business restructuring and competitiveness.

5. References

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Analytic Technologies

Borgatti, S.P., Mehra, A., Brass, D. and Labianca, G. (2009). Network Analysis in the

Social Sciences. Science 323( 5916): 892 – 895

Borgatti, S. P. & Cross, R. (2003). A Relational View of Information Seeking and

Learning in Social Networks, Management Science, 49(4): 432-445.

Carley, K.M. and Diesner, J. (2005). AutoMap: Software for Network Text Analysis.

Pittsburgh, PA: CASOS, CMU.

Corman, S. and Dooley, K. (2006), Crawdad Text Analysis System 2.0 , Chandler ,

Arizona : Crawdad Technologies, LLC.

Fulk, J. (2001) Global netorwk organizations: emergence and future prospects, Human

Relations, 54(1): 91-99.

Gulati, R. (1998) Alliances and networks, Strategic Management Journal, 19, 293–317.

Monge, P.R., & Contractor, N. (2003). Theories of communication networks, Oxford

University Press, New York.

Nohria, N. & Eccles, R.G. (1992) Networks and organizations: Structure, form and

action. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Scarbrough, H., & Swan, J., (2001) Explaining the Diffusion of Knowledge Management:

The Role of Fashion. British Journal of Management, 12(1):3-12.

Storper, M. and B. Harrison (1991) Flexibility, hierarchy and regional development: The

changing structure of industrial production systems and their forms of governance in the

1990s, Research Policy, 20: 407-422.

Tichy, N. and Fombrun, C. (1979) Network Analysis in Organizational Settings. Human

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Tichy, N. M., Tushman, M. L. and Fombrun, C. (1979) Social Network Analysis For

Organizations. Academy of Management Review, 4 (4): 507-519

Walter, J., Lechner, C. and Kellermanns F. W. (2008) Disentangling Alliance

Management Processes: Decision Making, Politicality, and Alliance Performance,

Journal of Management Studies, 45(3): 530-560.

i The search for articles on SCOPUS was performed on July 28th 2009 in the following way. First, we selected all the journal articles, review articles, and to be published articles from 1996 to 2009 with the words "social network analysis" OR "organizational network analysis" OR "network theory" OR "network research" in all the fields (title, abstract, keyword, references). We limited the search to the following peer-reviewed management journals: "Academy of Management Journal", "Academy of Management Review", "Accounting Organizations and Society", "Administration and Society", "Administrative Science Quarterly", "Advances in Strategic Management", "American Review of Public Administration", "Asia Pacific Journal of Management", "British Journal of Management", "Business Strategy and the Environment", "California Management Review", "Construction Management and Economics", "Corporate Governance", "E Co Emergence Complexity and Organization", "Electronic Commerce Research and Applications", "Entrepreneurship and Regional Development", "European Accounting Review", "European Journal of Innovation Management", "European Journal of Marketing", "European Management Journal", "Group and Organization Management", "Health Care Management Review", "Health

Services Research", "Human Relations", "Human Resource Development Review", "Industrial Marketing Management, "Information and Organization", "Information Technology and People", "International Business Review", "International Food and Agribusiness Management Review", "International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research", "International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management", "International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business", "International Journal of Human Resource Management", "International Journal of Information Management", "International Journal of Learning and Intellectual Capital", "International Journal of Management Reviews", "International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations", "International Journal of Technology Management", "International Journal of Technology Policy and Management", "International Small Business Journal", "Journal of Behavioral Health Services and Research", "Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing", "Journal of Business Ethics", "Journal of Business Research", "Journal of Business Venturing", "Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization", "Journal of Engineering and Technology Management Jet M", "Journal of High Technology Management Research", "Journal of Intellectual Capital", "Journal of International Business Studies", "Journal of International Management", "Journal of Knowledge Management", "Journal of Management Information Systems", "Journal of Management Inquiry", "Journal of Management Studies", "Journal of Management", "Journal of Marketing", "Journal of Operations Management", "Journal of Organizational Behavior", "Journal of Organizational Change Management", "Journal of Product Innovation Management", "Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory", "Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development", "Journal of Small Business Management", "Journal of Supply Chain Management", "Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science", "Knowledge Management Research and Practice", "Leadership Quarterly", "Long Range Planning", "Management Accounting Research", "Management Decision", "Management International Review", "Management", "MIS Quarterly Management Information Systems", "Organization Science", "Organization Studies", "Organization", "Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes", "Organizational Research Methods", "Public Administration Review", "Public Management Review", "R and D Management", "Research Policy", "Scandinavian Journal of Management", "Supply Chain Management", "Technology Analysis and Strategic Management", "Technovation", "Work and Occupations", "Work Employment and Society", ”Management Science", ”Strategic Management Journal". The search produces 1,319 results. We then selected just the articles with the words “network” or “social capital” in the title or abstract, or with the handbooks by Wasserman and Faust (1994) or by Scott (1991) among the references. This selection limited the results to those papers actually performing some SNA, and not just citing it. In total we selected 860 journal articles.