Mitchell Centre Seminar Series
| Dates: | 20 November 2019 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 17:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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Paola Zappa, School of Business – Maynooth University
Bridging cultural holes in organizations: The dynamic structure of social networks and organizational vocabularies within and across subunits.
The mechanisms by which social networks and organizational vocabularies combine jointly in affecting communication patterns crossing organizational boundaries remain largely unexplored. We examine whether the presence of network ties between organizational members explains similarity in the vocabularies that they use to describe the organization; or whether similarity in vocabularies explains the likelihood that members communicate with each other. We suggest that the dynamic structure of social networks and organizational vocabularies is contingent on the formal design of organizational subunits. Within subunit boundaries, members who interact with each other are more likely to develop similar vocabularies over time; between subunits, and interestingly, the more two members share similar organizational vocabularies, the more likely they are to form a tie over time. We find empirical evidence for these arguments in a longitudinal study conducted among the top managers of a multi-unit energy organization. Organizational vocabularies, we suggest, may sustain communication patterns across organizational boundaries, thus bridging cultural holes within organizations.
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G6
Humanities Bridgeford Street
Manchester
