Social network analysis and organizational control in complex projects: construction of EXPO 2010 in China

Abstract

Social network analysis (SNA) has been widely used to explore the existence and strength of connections among various actors within an organization. Recently, understanding and interpreting social aspects in project organization have gained great interest in project management research. Consequently, there is a need to analyse complex project organization (CPO) by using SNA with increasing numbers of large-scale and complex projects. The goal of this research is to better appreciate the social network relations in a CPO environment and to improve the organizational efficiency and team performance through new organizational control mechanisms (OCMs). This study first discusses a multi-level social network framework with a focus on the CPO where major analytical components of the framework are presented including modelling elements and structures and preferred parameters. Next, social network-oriented OCM and strategies are illustrated and compared with regular organizational controls. To examine the mentio...