1 / 6

Cohesive Groups

Cohesive Groups. By Silvia Neamtu 2 nd of March 2010. Important Concepts. The strength of weak ties (Granovetter) – information sharing and innovation possible; Structural holes (Burt) – brokerage opportunities; Small worlds (Watts) – cohesive linking and long-distance ties;

odell
Download Presentation

Cohesive Groups

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Cohesive Groups By Silvia Neamtu 2nd of March 2010

  2. Important Concepts • The strength of weak ties (Granovetter) – information sharing and innovation possible; • Structural holes (Burt) – brokerage opportunities; • Small worlds (Watts) – cohesive linking and long-distance ties; • Intercohesion (Vedres and Stark) – the overlapping of cohesive group structures; • Homophily (Kossinets and Watts) – “like to associate with like” (p. 405).

  3. Origins of Homophily • The tendency of “like to associate with like”; • Similarity of attributes and experience -> evaluating, communicating with and predicting the behaviour of others; • Origins of homophily – similarity and prozimity; choice homophily, induced homophily; assumption: relevant social environments arise out of the individual choices, whose subsequent friendship choices the environments then constrain (p. 407); • Both play an important role, based on the risk sets (shared foci – that act to constrain the set of potential alters with whom any individual can form ties).

  4. Interchohesion – diversity within familiarity • Network topology – structural fold (multiple insiders); • Explains group performance and group breakup; • Generate recombinations – interaction among different comunities -> diverse resources and familiarity; • Lineages of cohesion – facilitate the emergence of structural folds;

  5. Methods • Identifying cohesion - The Clique Percolation Method (CPM) – “starts from cohesive localities, recognizes groups independent of the global network environment, and identifies structural folds” (Vedres and Stark 2010, p. 15); • Assessing group performance – multivariate models – intercohesion and growth (intra- and extracohesive processes, control variables); • Assessing group stability – the flow of members between all groups in adjacent years (multivariate regression model – dependent variable - group stability; independent variables - intracohesion, extracohesion, control variables); • Finding a middleground – recombinant lineages of cohesion (historical structure of membership flows – structure + temporal processes)

  6. Conclusions: • Through overlapping of strong ties to more than one group, structural folding provides opportunities for recombining knowledge practices, leading this way to patterns of information sharing and innovation. • Groups form and reform along lines of patterned coherence, separating to encompass greater diversity while rejoining to benefit from familiarity. • Both structure and agency matter for the way these groups recombine.

More Related