Tag Archive for 'organization'

Interorganizational Collaboration: Evidence from Patent Data

Published on November 26, 2010 by Steffen Blaschke in English and Forschung. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Friday afternoon, the perfect time to put on your cheerful research face, stretch those programming fingers, and dig deep into some data. (I recommend some Bebop to hum along to, but that’s just me.) Today on the menu: Freshly served patent data from your friendly neighborhood European Patent Office, just the right taste to find interorganizational collaboration.

So, here’s what I did: I downloaded some weekly EBD patent data, briefly glanced at the EBD Quick Guide explaining the XML structure, fired up my trusty Ruby, and pulled the below collaboration networks for this year’s weeks 42 through 47.

Vertices are organizations, edges are jointly filed patent applications. See the patterns emerge? Now, if I could only get my hands on the entire data from 1998 until now. It’s only 1180 Euro, maybe I should start saving.

The Organization of War

Published on July 29, 2010 by Steffen Blaschke in English and Forschung. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

Every once in a while, some interesting data is put on the Internet that organization studies just eat up. Back in 2004, for example, the Enron e-mail dataset provided a unique chance to study the downfall of a company as brought on by its accounting malpractice (a.k.a. fraud).

This week marks a similarly interesting case, the leak of 76,911 secret US military reports by WikiLeaks, now known as the Kabul War Diary. The data has already been taking apart by The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, but scientist (e.g., Drew Conway over at Zero Intelligence Agents) are only beginning to engulf themselves in the data.

With a particular interest in the communicative constitution of organization, I dove into the data myself and dug up what I deem to be the organization of war. Take a look at the below graph.

The Organization of the Afghan War

The 200+ vertices represent military units and the 600+ edges represent communication between them. A short note, the reports feature more than 1,500 units, but I got rid of the isolates. Moreover, I assume communication to take place between units if these are at the same time in the same place. All of this information is in the reports, which “need to answer the critical questions: Who, When, Where, What, With whom, by what Means and Why” (WikiLeaks, 2010).

In addition to the graph, I pulled some quick network measures out of the magic R hat:

degree betweenness closeness
A SIGACTS MANAGER 0.743119266 0.598042676 0.03356428
CJTF-82 0.23853211 0.372130537 0.033369049
DRUID – ISAF 0.165137615 0.048233629 0.032727819
- 0.146788991 0.052302377 0.032708177
CJSOTF-A 0.146788991 0.044388154 0.03270327
205th RCAG 0.137614679 0.033400777 0.032698365
TF PALADIN LNO 0.128440367 0.045990081 0.032826382
TF MTN Warrior SIGACT Manager 0.091743119 0.039942079 0.032708177
TF East JOC Watch 0.073394495 0.034323879 0.032722906
TF GUARDIAN 0.064220183 0.049139513 0.033115601

As you can see, the two central vertices are A SIGACTS MANAGER and CJTF-82, which are some managerial unit for significant activities (i.e., SIGACTS) and the Combined Joint Task Force 82. Both are important military units as their communication with others provides the proverbial glue to the organizational network.

My research is far from finished, but right now this initial shot at the data is just for play. If you’re interested in the edge list that I generated from the reports, drop me a line, I’d be happy to share.

Crisis is What You Make of It

Published on January 26, 2010 by Steffen Blaschke in English and Meinung. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

There’s no doubt that natural disasters such as the recent earthquake in Haiti cause a great deal of tragic for people. The same is true for terrorist attacks and large-scale accidents, whether it is 9/11 or Madrid train bombings, oil tankers sinking or planes crashing. Notwithstanding the individual pain and grief, these disasters, attacks, and accidents frequently cause organizational crisis, too. Not just any crisis, but one that’s hard — if not impossible — to escape for organizations, just to be clear.

But there is also organizational crisis that is either caused by an organization itself, which makes it preventable in the first place, or accidentally taken to an organization as if the organization were responsible for it. Often enough, both kind of crisis are indistinguishable. Just think of how involved each and every organization is in the current financial crisis …

… one, two, three …

… right, too complex a network to track the inner workings of this mess. Although we speak of the global financial crisis, each and every organization necessarily has it’s own take on the situation. Necessarily, really?, you say. Yeah, because the crisis I’m talking about is not something out there, it’s not an objective reality.

Crisis is what you make of it. An excellent proof of concept are German medium enterprises working on the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai. None of them complain about any crisis, but continue to rely on their reputation to deliver quality work. For example, Miele just closed a deal to outfit all 900 suites in the tower with complete kitchens.

The fact that some organizations thrive in the face of crisis isn’t to say that they should ignore the facts, I merely try to make the point that you’re your own luck’s master. And maybe a more critical thinking of classic management science and organization theory is in place. Constitutive theories of organization may be worth a look and a new generation of managers may be better suited to deal with crisis than the ones trained in traditional economic fashion.

Mapping Political Agendas

Published on December 21, 2009 by Steffen Blaschke in English, Forschung and Theorie. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

It’s generally a good idea to stay on one’s scientific home turf. After all, it takes quite a while to master a particular theory, let alone an entire discipline. However, interdisciplinary research is a must nowadays, so it’s accepted practice to stray in uncharted territory. With an invitation to speak at a political science workshop in Spring 2010, I apply my ideas of inside-out networks to the communications of the Deutscher Bundestag (i.e., the German Parliament), thus mapping the respective political agenda.

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Inside-Out Networks

Published on November 29, 2009 by Steffen Blaschke in English and Forschung. 4 Comments Tags: , , .

I’m that guy who loves to talk about networks. Networks in general. All of them. Social networks, a little bit. You know, Facebook, Twitter, the whole nine media yards. More importantly, though, I’m that guy who loves to talk about networks that no one else is thinking of. Networks of Communications. Plural. With an s in the end.

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Entscheidung und Organisation

Published on November 18, 2009 by Steffen Blaschke in Meinung and Theorie. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Manchmal reicht einfach nur ein Kommentar nicht aus. Im seinem Beitrag Wenn die Lösung das Problem ist … beantwortet Fabian Hattke die Frage seiner Studenten nach dem Zusammenspiel zwischen Entscheidung und Organisation kurz und schmerzlos mit Hilfe von Paul Watzlawick. Ich möchte dem gerne ein paar Zeilen hinzufügen. Manchmal reicht einfach eben nur ein Kommentar nicht aus.

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