Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Publication
    SCCD: Social Capital-Driven Career Development Framework
    Sociological theories of career success provide fundamental principles for the analysis of social networks to identify patterns that facilitate career development. Structural Hole Theory argues that certain network structures provide advantages to individuals by facilitating them to access unique information from parts of the network. The network structural advantages of social networks in workplace settings have not been studied enough for the purpose of employees career development. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a Social Capital-Driven Career Development framework which leverages enterprise collaboration activity streams to assess employees social capital across organizational hierarchy levels. We demonstrate that our framework can enable employees to reflect on their social network structure from the prospective of information benefits for progressing their career from one hierarchy level to the immediate next level in their respective business units.
      365
  • Publication
    A Framework for Enterprise Social Network Assessment and Weak Ties Recommendation
    Sociological theories of career success provide fundamental principles for the analysis of social links to identify patterns that facilitate career development. Some theories (e.g. Granovetter's Strength of Weak Ties Theory and Burt's Structural Hole Theory) have shown that certain types of social ties provide career advantage to individuals by facilitating them to access unique information and connecting them with a diverse range of others in different social cliques. The assessment of link types and prediction of new links in the external social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have been studied extensively. However, this has not been addressed in the enterprise social networks and especially the prediction of weak ties in the context of employee career development. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing an Enterprise Weak Ties Recommendation (EWTR) framework which leverages enterprise social networks, employee collaboration activity streams and the organizational chart. We formulate weak ties recommendation as a link prediction problem. However, unlike any generic link prediction work, we first validated explicit enterprise social network with a set of heterogeneous collaboration networks and show assessment improves the explicit network's effectiveness in predicting new links. Furthermore, we leverage assessed social network for the weak ties prediction by optimizing the link prediction methods using organizational chart information. We demonstrate that optimization improves prediction accuracy in terms of AUC and average precision and our characterization of weak ties to a certain extent aligns with Granovetter's and Burt's seminal studies.
    Scopus© Citations 6  464
  • Publication
    Structural Hole Centrality: Evaluating Social Capital through Strategic Network Formation
    (Springer, 2020-09-17) ;
    Strategic network formation is a branch of network science that takes an economic perspective to the creation of social networks, considering that actors in a network form links in order to maximise some utility that they attain through their connections to other actors in the network. In particular, Jackson’s Connections model, writes an actor’s utility as a sum over all other actors that can be reached along a path in the network of a benefit value that diminishes with the path length. In this paper, we are interested in the “social capital” that an actor retains due to their position in the network. Social capital can be understood as an ability to bond with actors, as well as an ability to form a bridge that connects otherwise disconnected actors. This bridging benefit has previously been modelled in another “structural hole” network formation game, proposed by Kleinberg. In this paper, we develop an approach that generalises the utility of Kleinberg’s game and combines it with that of the Connections model, to create a utility that models both the bonding and bridging capabilities of an actor with social capital. From this utility and its associated formation game, we derive a new centrality measure, which we dub “structural hole centrality”, to identify actors with high social capital. We analyse this measure by applying it to networks of different types, and assessing its correlation to other centrality metrics, using a benchmark dataset of 299 networks, drawn from different domains. Finally, using one social network from the dataset, we illustrate how an actor’s “structural hole centrality profile” can be used to identify their bridging and bonding value to the network.
    Scopus© Citations 10  29