Dear COR Community,

Please join us for the End-of-Year Celebration, recognition of our members’ accomplishments, catching up with colleagues before summer and… announcement of COR small grants awards!

Friday, June 7, 2019
12:00-1:30pm
SBSG 1321

Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to COR cor@uci.edu by Monday, June 3.

We greatly look forward to seeing you,

Nina Bandelj and Melissa Mazmanian
COR Co-Directors

A talk of interest to the COR community…

“Network Hubs Cease to be Influential in the Presence of Low Levels of
Advertising”

Speaker: Gabriel Rossman, UCLA
Date: May 10, 2019
Time: 10:30-12:00noon
Venue: SB1 5200 (Porter Colloquium Room)

Abstract:
The “influentials” or “opinion leadership” hypothesis argues that social network hubs have disproportionate importance to how new ideas and behaviors spread. Previous research affirming this hypothesis has assumed that all learning occurs through the network, but we conduct a computational experiment in which we allow learning both through the network and from external sources of information (e.g., advertising). We replicate opinion leadership, but only in the region of parameter space where external influence is absent. When the model allows even trivial levels of external influence, hubs are no more important to diffusion than nodes chosen at random.

Dear COR Community,

Please join us for our next paper development workshop on Friday, May 24, featuring work of Professors Katie Pine and Melissa Mazmanian, “Organizing for Data: Crafting Data Elements in the ‘Data-Driven’  Organization.”

Discussants: Kim Fortun (Anthropology) and Gerardo Okhuysen (Merage)

May 24, 2019
12:00-1:30pm
SBSG 1321

Please RSVP to cor@uci.edu by May 15 to receive a paper to read ahead of the workshop. Lunch will be provided.

“Organizing for Data: Crafting Data Elements in the ‘Data-Driven’ Organization”

Organizations in a variety of sectors are adopting an array of techniques known broadly as “data driven” or “algorithmic management.” Digital workflow systems increase the availability of high-quality information available in real time. The promise of such systems lies in the representation of activities and work process that provide new forms of knowledge and enhanced decision making capacity. However, in order to achieve these goals, workflow system require stable, accurate, and uniform data. Creating and crafting such data rarely happen in everyday organizational processes. While recent literature has examined how the effects of such workflow systems on organizational functioning, little scholarly attention has been paid to how organizations must organize in order to become “data driven.” In other words, what is the work involved in “organizing for data” that organizations engage in? Emerging from a multi-sited ethnographic study of multiple hospitals and a meso-level healthcare policy organization, we find that organizations re-tooled existing work practices and implemented new forms of data work in order to create, manage, and deploy data for management, research, and accountability. Such practices are a precursor to becoming “data driven” and suggest that we cannot begin to understand scope of what it takes to become “data driven” without examining the practices that organizations must engage in prior to implementation of complex workflow systems. Further, we find that organizing for data is never complete. Even when it appears that a data lifecycle has reached an idealized state and has been made amenable to a comprehensive system, subjectivities remain. Data crafting requires situated judgement and decision making. However, these subjectivities are masked in service of creating ‘clean’ and  ‘objective’ measures that are legible to digital workflow systems.

A talk of interest to the COR community…

“Physical Collocation, Formal Work Relationships, and Work Related Interactions in Organizations”

SPEAKER:  Jonathon Cummings, Professor of Management and Organizations

UNIVERSITY: Duke University, The Fuqua School of Business
DATE:          May 3, 2019
TIME:           10:00 am – 11:30 am
WHERE:      SB1 5100

ABSTRACT:
This presentation focuses on how work-related interactions (‘who interacts with whom about work’) are shaped by two key elements of organizations: physical collocation and formal work relationships. Whereas physical collocation captures the extent to which employees are proximate to one another in physical space (e.g., sit next to each other), formal work relationships capture the extent to which employees depend on one another within the organizational structure (e.g., boss-subordinate or members of the same functional unit). Prior research has shown how physical collocation and formal work relationships each positively impact work-related interactions, but less is known about their joint impact. For example, compared to collocated employees who have a formal work relationship, non-collocated employees may experience a relative boost in work-related interactions because of increased awareness, socialization, and opportunity. In addition, prior research has focused on collocation within a dyad, but less is known about the role of third-parties who are also collocated with employees. For example, compared to an employee who is not collocated with her boss, an employee who is collocated with her boss may experience a relative decline in work-related interactions because of concerns about monitoring by her boss. Given that physical collocation is often confounded with formal work relationships in organizations, the research design took advantage of quasi-random variation in the office seating of employees after the relocation of a corporate headquarters to a new building. Survey data on work-related interactions were collected from 143 employees three months prior to the move (when members of the same functional unit sat next to each other) and three months after the move (when employees were randomly assigned to seats within zones of the office, thus members of different functional units sat next to each other). The findings suggest that collocation among employees was generally good for work-related interactions, especially for those employees who did not have formal work relationships. However, the collocation of a boss with an employee was generally bad for work-related interactions with other employees, especially when they did not have a formal work relationship. Implications for the intersection of organization design, social networks, and collaborative technology are discussed.