We identify the "organization" of a human social group as the communication network(s) within that group. We then introduce three theoretical approaches to analyzing what determines the structures of human organizations. All three approaches adopt a group-selection perspective, so that the group's network structure is (approximately) optimal, given the information-processing limitations of agents within the social group, and the exogenous welfare function of the overall group. In the first approach we use a new sub-field of telecommunications theory called network coding, and focus on a welfare function that involves the ability of the organization to convey information among the agents. In the second approach we focus on a scenario where agents within the organization must allocate their future communication resources when the state of the future environment is uncertain. We show how this formulation can be solved with a linear program. In the third approach, we introduce an information synthesis problem in which agents within an organization receive information from various sources and must decide how to transform such information and transmit the results to other agents in the organization. We propose leveraging the computational power of neural networks to solve such problems. These three approaches formalize and synthesize work in fields including anthropology, archeology, economics and psychology that deal with organization structure, theory of the firm, span of control and cognitive limits on communication.
Weaker Coherence, Weaker Reciprocity: Comparing the Semantic and Social Organization of Moltbook and Reddit
Universidad de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales（布宜诺斯艾利斯大学，理学院）；Instituto de Física Interdisciplinaria y Aplicada (INFINA), CONICET – Universidad de Buenos Aires（跨学科与应用物理研究所 (INFINA)，阿根廷国家科学研究委员会 - 布宜诺斯艾利斯大学）；Instituto Balseiro, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo y Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica（巴尔塞罗研究所，门多萨国立大学与阿根廷国家原子能委员会）；Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)（阿根廷国家科学研究委员会 (CONICET)）
Organizational network analysis (ONA) is a method for studying interactions within formal organizations. The utility of ONA has grown substantially over the years as means to analyze the relationships developed within and between teams, departments, and other organizational units. The mapping and quantifying of these relationships have been shown to provide insight into the exchange of information and resources, the building of social capital, and the spread of culture within and between organizations. However, the ethical concerns regarding personally identifiable information (PII) that exist…
Wrocław University of Science and Technology（弗罗茨瓦夫理工大学）
Formation of a hierarchy within an organization is a natural way of assigning the duties, delegating responsibilities and optimizing the flow of information. Only for the smallest companies the lack of the hierarchy, that is, a flat one, is possible. Yet, if they grow, the introduction of a hierarchy is inevitable. Most often, its existence results in different nature of the tasks and duties of its members located at various organizational levels or in distant parts of it. On the other hand, employees often send dozens of emails each day, and by doing so, and also by being engaged in other act…
In this study, we consider users' online communication rhythms (online social rhythms) as coupled oscillators in a complex social network. Users' rhythms may be entrained onto those of their friends, and macro-scale pattern of such rhythms can emerge. We investigated the entrainment in online social rhythms and long-range correlations of the rhythms using an avatar communication dataset. We indicated entrainment in online social rhythms to emerge if the strength of a new connection reaches a threshold. This entrainment spread via densely-connected clusters. Consequently, long-range correlation…
Resilience denotes the capacity of a system to withstand shocks and its ability to recover from them. We develop a framework to quantify the resilience of highly volatile, non-equilibrium social organizations, such as collectives or collaborating teams. It consists of four steps: (i) \emph{delimitation}, i.e., narrowing down the target systems, (ii) \emph{conceptualization}, .e., identifying how to approach social organizations, (iii) formal \emph{representation} using a combination of agent-based and network models, (iv) \emph{operationalization}, i.e. specifying measures and demonstrating ho…
The study of criminal networks using traces from heterogeneous communication media is acquiring increasing importance in nowadays society. The usage of communication media such as phone calls and online social networks leaves digital traces in the form of metadata that can be used for this type of analysis. The goal of this work is twofold: first we provide a theoretical framework for the problem of detecting and characterizing criminal organizations in networks reconstructed from phone call records. Then, we introduce an expert system to support law enforcement agencies in the task of unveili…
Social networks have increasingly become important and popular in modern times. Moreover, the influence of social networks plays a vital role in various organizations including government organizations, academic research or corporate organizations. Therefore, how to strategize the optimal propagation strategy in social networks has also become more important. By increasing the precision of evaluating the propagation probability of social network, it can indirectly influence the investment of cost, manpower and time for information propagation to achieve the best return. This study proposes a n…
Attention to informal communication networks within public organizations has grown in recent decades. While research has documented the role of individual cognition and social structure in understanding information search in organizations, this article emphasizes the importance of formal hierarchy. We argue that the structural attributes of bureaucracies are too important to be neglected when modeling knowledge flows in public organizations. Empirically, we examine interpersonal information seeking patterns among 143 employees in a small city government, using exponential random graph modeling…
The interaction patterns of employees in social and professional networks play an important role in the success of employees and organizations as a whole. However, in many fields there is a severe under-representation of minority groups; moreover, minority individuals may be segregated from the rest of the network or isolated from one another. While the problem of increasing the representation of minority groups in various fields has been well-studied, diver- sification in terms of numbers alone may not be sufficient: social relationships should also be considered. In this work, we consider th…
Optimism about the Internet's potential to bring the world together has been tempered by concerns about its role in inflaming the 'culture wars'. Via mass selection into like-minded groups, online society may be becoming more fragmented and polarized, particularly with respect to partisan differences. However, our ability to measure the social makeup of online communities, and in turn understand the social organization of online platforms, is limited by the pseudonymous, unstructured, and large-scale nature of digital discussion. We develop a neural embedding methodology to quantify the positi…
Political organizations worldwide keep innovating their use of social media technologies. In the 2019 Indian general election, organizers used a network of WhatsApp groups to manipulate Twitter trends through coordinated mass postings. We joined 600 WhatsApp groups that support the Bharatiya Janata Party, the right-wing party that won the general election, to investigate these campaigns. We found evidence of 75 hashtag manipulation campaigns in the form of mobilization messages with lists of pre-written tweets. Building on this evidence, we estimate the campaigns' size, describe their organiza…
We examine how Canadians living in the East York section of Toronto exchange social support. Just as we have had to deconstruct social support to understand its component parts, we now deconstruct how different types of communication technologies play socially supportive roles. We draw on 101 in-depth interviews conducted in 2013-2014 to shed light on the support networks of a sample of East York residents and discern the role of communication technologies in the exchange of different types of social support across age groups. Our findings show that not much has changed since the 1960s in term…
