Assessing organizational stability via network analysis

Abstract

It is widely known that the email system forms a social network. Analysis of email networks reveals properties similar to classic social networks such as friendship or academic collaboration networks. Like other social networks, the properties observed in email networks are the result of patterns of human social behavior rather than the underlying technology. Hence, email social network properties correlate to the social environment in which they are generated. The overall social behavior observed in an organization may be attributed directly to organizational stability and robustness. As a result, organizational health and robustness may be discerned by examining the social network properties of the network formed by the email interaction of its employees because they certainly reflect changes in organizational mood. The fears, worries, gossips, the good and the bad, are reflected in the email activity of individuals in the organization; the challenge though is to extract his information from the network itself. In this paper we provide a first step in the process of demonstrating that email social network analysis can tell us more about the organization than we may think; we show using a case study based on the Enron corporation that problems in the organization were apparent as an emergent characteristic of social network formed by email exchange in the organization.