Steve Borgatti - Social network analysis is basically the study of how people are connected
to each other. We study is the set of relations among a set of entities, could be an organization,
it could be a country, it could be a school. What we do is we map them and then construct
metrics to try to characterize like, “What is the structure of that network?” and try
to figure out why does it have the structure that it does. And we also look at the individual
and see, “So where is that individual located in that structure?”
It’s hard to find something that is not organized as a network. If you’re trying
to understand something about the world around you, you kinda have to learn something about
networks. They sort of act like pipes and through a network things can flow from person
to person. Particularly in organizations, which is what I study, it’s how things get
done. It’s how work gets done. It’s how we coordinate you know the 370,000 people
that work for IBM. How do they all work together to get something done? It’s through formal
and informal networks.
I mostly study centrality, which is the concept of the advantage that accrues to a node by
virtue of its position in the network. So some nods are more central and there’s certain
advantages to that. So for example, one way in which you could be central is that you’re
not far from everybody else in the network, there are few steps in between.
People like that tend to hear things faster.
So if information is flowing through the network, they hear it early
when they can take advantage of it. One of the things that central people have
is that they are connected to lots of different pots, different parts of the network.
This part over here is talking about certain things, and this part is talking about certain things,
and the person that happens to be connected to both can realize that the problem that
they’ve got has already been solved by that group
and they can really provide a lot of value.
The big data issue. Normally, particularly me, my work is done with surveys. I take 500
people and I do a survey, I ask them a bunch of questions and it’s all voluntary. They
provide the information if they want to, but you can’t do really large groups with that.
If you wanted to study the structure of the network of IBM, we’d want to use some other
means like maybe look at the e-mails trafficked that goes from person to person within the
organization. Or maybe we’d go to Twitter or something like that, we’re not actually
talking to each person and getting each persons permission to do that, so now we’ve got
some privacy issues. And that’s going to be the case increasingly as we use Facebook
data, Twitter data, and so on. We’ve got to resolve that. It may not be a legal issue,
but I think is an ethical issue. Also an issue of getting people to participate. If people
think that their data are being used and we’re not somehow paying them for that kind of data
or in some way helping them out with it, there’s no reason for them to do it.
About a decade ago, the chair of my department, Dan Brass, made a strategic decision that
we were going to be excellent and we were going to be excellent in social networks and
management. He started to bring some really good minds developed a really great concentration
and that’s why I came. I was at Boston College and I came here because I couldn’t resist
the idea of a management department that was focused on social networks. And it’s been
a fantastic decision because the moment I came here my productivity went up. The College
of Public Health has a lot of network people. I’ve seen new hires now in Communication
and Education. Throughout the campus there’s a lot of interest and having that many people
together makes it possible to do things that you just can’t do otherwise. We created
the LINKS Center for Social Network Analysis, and one of the things that the LINKS Center
does is that we put on a workshop every year to teach people how to do social network analysis.
We have trained now over a thousand people. And we do that with a staff of 28 instructors
and assistants, and the only way to field that many people is to have this huge concentration
here and have all of our graduate students doing the same thing and all of our faculty.
So it is an ideal place to do what I’m doing.