Sunbelt XXXI International Network for Social Network ... - INSNA

Revealing Legitimacy Structures From Discourse. A Semantic Network Approach To Organizational Identity Construction.Barberio, Vitaliano; Lomi, AlessandroWords and Networks ‐ Organizational Communication, Team DynamicsOrganization Theory, Semantic Networks, Discourse Structure, IdentitySAT.PM2This paper argues about the role of discourse in shaping legitimacy through organizational identity construction. Then it introduces a semantic network methodfor the structural characterization of discursive organizational identity. In managerial literature organizational identity is referred to either as a set of shared“mental models” emerging from organizational assessment or as a set of “claims” borrowed from a reference institutional field. We conceptualize discursiveorganizational identity in a way that bridges these two points of view. Discourse is here regarded to as a “symbolic space” of identity construction. Within thisspace, both issues arising from the operational environment of an organization and societal judgments of understandability of the entailed organizationalaction interact in complex ways. In order to explore this interaction a semantic network method is introduced. Departing from rhetoric analysis, whose focus ison stylistic elements of communication, the method proposed here allows the representation of discourse as a structural symbolic space. Meaning structuresare represented as networks of voices (as spokesmen) and symbols (as words). Once discourse’s elements are modeled as networks of voices and symbols, anumber of positioning techniques can be used for assessing their interaction. Here we have illustrated the use of correspondence analysis for positioning bothspokesmen and issues and the use of structural equivalence for revealing the institutional model entailed into claims. In order to illustrate our methodempirically we have analyzed the electoral manifestos of six candidates running for presidential elections recently held at a large university in northern Italy.Revisiting Small‐World Networks: Is The World Small?Opsahl, ToreAnalyzing Network DataMethods, Simulation, Small World, Two‐mode Networks, Weighted NetworksSAT.PM1Small‐world networks have been found to exist in abundance. Most studies focus on observing an average distance among nodes that is comparable to onefound in corresponding classical random networks. Two issues are worth considering when comparing observed properties to random ones: (1) what is acorresponding random network, and (2) how close should an observed value be to the randomly expected one to be deemed comparable. In this presentation,I will show how various types of randomisations impact on the randomly expected value of both the average distance and a second small‐world property,clustering, in a range of domains, and how to determine whether the two properties are statistically non‐significantly different from and significantly higherthan, respectively, the randomly expected values. The results demonstrate that small‐world networks are far from as abundant as previously thought, and onlya few networks satisfy both properties.