Recently, there has been an increasing interest in how strategic action influences network structure. Motivated by the widespread belief that ‘networks matter’ in the process of reaching personal objectives, it is a natural assumption that rational actors will try to strategically arrange their ties in order to optimize their expected utility. Starting from the notion that there exist rival theories on what the best strategy is to form linkages and that the applicability of these theories varies across social contexts, we will examine how (groups of) actors change their networks in order to reach better positions. Theoretical results predict that emerging networks are to a large extent contingent on the social context and the adjacent behavior actors follow to choose their relations in such a context. Experiments will be used to test this conjecture.

Abstract not found

Although both betweenness and closeness centrality are claimed to be important for the effectiveness of someone’s network position, it has not been explicitly studied which networks emerge if actors follow incentives for these two positional advan-tages. We propose such a model and observe that network dynamics differ consid-erably in a scenario with either betweenness or closeness incentives compared to a scenario in which closeness and betweenness incentives are combined. Considering social consequences, we find low clustering when actors strive for either type of centrality. Surprisingly, actors striving for closeness are likely to reach networks with relatively low closeness and high betweenness, while this is the other way round for actors striving for betweenness. This shows that in both situations the network formation process implies a social dilemma in which the social optimum is not reached by individual optimizing.

We examine organizational field change instigated by activists. Contrary to existing views emphasizing incumbent resistance, we suggest that collaboration between in-cumbents and challenger movements may emerge when a movement’s cultural and relational fabric becomes moderately structured, creating threats and market oppor-tunities but remaining permeable to external influence. We also elucidate how lead incumbents ’ attempts at movement cooptation may be deflected through distributed brokerage. The resulting confluence of cultural and relational “structuration ” between movement and field accelerates the pace but dilutes the radicalness of institutional innovation, ensuring ongoing, incremental field change. Overall, this article contrib-utes to the emergent literature on field dynamics by uncovering the evolution and outcomes of collaborative work at the intersection of social movements and incumbent fields. The agentic turn in institutional theory has marked a shift in attention from the isomorphic forces that stabilize organizational fields toward consideration of the dynamic processes by which fields form and transform (Dacin, Goodstein, & Scott, 2002). Following early work that focused on exogenous jolts (Meyer, 1982) and institutional en-trepreneurs (DiMaggio, 1988), field-level change has been increasingly characterized as the outcome of collective action involving social movements

The social network side of individual innovation:

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Very preliminary version; 09/23/07. I am grateful to John Hagedoorn and Wilko Letterie for their invaluable support and advice. I am also very appreciative of the helpful comments and suggestions

Is social network analysis just measures and methods with no theory? We attempt to clarify some confusions, address some previous critiques and controversies surrounding the issues of structure, human agency, endogeneity, tie content, network change, and context, and add a few critiques of our own. We use these issues as an opportunity to discuss the fundamental characteristics of network theory and to provide our thoughts on opportunities for future research in social network analysis. 3

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in how strategic action influences network structure. Motivated by the widespread belief that ‘networks matter ’ in the process of reaching personal objectives, it is a natural assumption that rational actors will try to strategically arrange their ties in order to optimize their expected utility. Starting from the notion that there exist rival theories on what is the best strategy to form linkages and that the applicability of these theories varies across social contexts, we will examine how (groups of) actors change their networks in order to get better positions. Theoretical results predict that emerging networks are to a large extent contingent on the social context and the adjacent strategy actors follow to choose their relations. Experiments will be used to test this conjecture.

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