Scholars have long recognized that teachers’ social interactions play an important role in their learning and professional development. Still, while a growing body of research shows that teaching-focused social ties can give precollege educators access to valuable information, knowledge, and advice—or "social capital"—that improves professional practice and student learning, empirical, mixed methods studies on the phenomenon in the higher education sector are rare, and few investigate what conditions are necessary for these social ties to develop among college instructors. Focusing on college faculty in 17 associate- and baccalaureate-level institutions in one U.S. city, this study uses survey and interview data to explore the connections between structural and positional educator characteristics and the "social networks," or compilations of social ties, in which faculty reported discussing teaching. Regression analyses of survey responses (n = 244) indicate that fewer years of teaching experience, the time faculty take preparing to teach, discipline, and institution type are correlated with social network dimensions linked to improved professional practice. An inductive analysis of interview data from a subset of faculty (n = 22) supplements survey
findings with descriptions of how teaching experience, organizational support, and other
factors constrain and reinforce the development of teaching-focused social ties. Results
confirm and extend prior research indicating that the development of teaching-focused social
networks and the accrual of ties linked to social capital demand faculty and organizational
investment. Findings also suggest that leaders hoping to foster beneficial ties should tailor
instructional initiatives to more closely align with faculty experience and time commitments.
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The duality of networks and groups: Models to generate two-mode networks from one-mode networks
Abstract Shared memberships, social statuses, beliefs, and places can facilitate the formation of social ties. Two-mode projections provide a method for transforming two-mode data on individuals’ memberships in such groups into a one-mode network of their possible social ties. In this paper, I explore the opposite process: how social ties can facilitate the formation of groups, and how a two-mode network can be generated from a one-mode network. Drawing on theories of team formation, club joining, and organization recruitment, I propose three models that describe how such groups might emerge from the relationships in a social network. I show that these models can be used to generate two-mode networks that have characteristics commonly observed in empirical two-mode social networks and that they encode features of the one-mode networks from which they were generated. I conclude by discussing these models’ limitations and future directions for theory and methods concerning group formation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2211744
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10430768
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Network Science
- ISSN:
- 2050-1242
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 14
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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null (Ed.)PURPOSE: Firms do not continue and prosper purely on their own individual endeavors, as each firm is influenced by the activities of others, and thus direct and indirect relationships shape the firm’s strategic management. These relationships form the tactics by which knowledge and other strategically important resources are accessed and created. Forming and maintaining ties among members of a network have been the subject of numerous research studies in the social, economic, and business literature. Our work is framed by the resource-based view of the firm perspective along with social capital theory and its shared constructs in network theory. Prior findings suggest that networking ties are strategic actions generated for firm growth and continuance. The ties may be short-term or develop into long-term relationships. The intent of this research is to fill some of the gaps in interorganizational networking strategy by analyzing five antecedents that have been suggested in the literature as individually associated with entrepreneurs’ engagement in network ties. In this way, our work provides another research avenue for examining networking’s contribution to strategic management. We hypothesized positive connections to entrepreneurs’ engagement in network ties from antecedents involving the firm’s knowledge absorptive capacity, business goals, entrepreneurial orientation, social interactions, and support from their environment. METHODOLOGY: In our quantitative approach, we tested our proposed macrolevel direct and moderating connections through an online survey of 125 U.S. apparel manufacturing firms. The apparel manufacturing sector in the U.S., as in many countries, has struggled with multiple disrupting factors contributing to the sector’s decline in firm continuance. FINDINGS: The results from OLS regression analyses support our hypothesized connections in that each of the five antecedents significantly contributed to entrepreneurs’ engagement in network ties; however, when all five were collectively examined only absorptive capacity, social interaction, and business goals were significant (R2 = 0.58). Further examination of moderation effects found the entrepreneurs’ perceptions of a supportive environment to modify both entrepreneurial orientation and business goals. RESEARCH AND PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: The effects of a supportive environment on business goals’ relationship with network ties were greater when perceptions of a supportive environment decreased, while the effects of a supportive environment on entrepreneurship orientation’s relationship with network ties were greater when perceptions of a supportive environment increased suggesting further study of U.S. entrepreneurs’ perceptions of their environments. Entrepreneurs’ interested in building domestic and international supply chain ties may find network ties provide one solution for adapting the firm’s resources for global competitiveness. Future studies may direct attention to other industry sectors or countries for replication with larger sample sizes as we recognize the limitations to generalizability and scale refinement due to our limited sample size. ORIGINALITY AND VALUE: The examination of five constructs to shed light on how an organization’s decisions may relate to engaging in networks and provides theoretical as well as practical implications that contribute to the larger organizational system framework.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1017/nws.2023.3
