The analysis of relations in an organisation

Abstract

In this paper a number of relations are considered that hold between the individual members of a small organisation: relations of cognition or acquaintance, formal and informal communication, the affective relation corresponding to like or dislike, and the relation of direct superiority or subordinacy. For each of these relations a similarity or proximity relation is constructed. Two individuals will be related under the proximity relation derived from the informal communicat ion relation, say, when they are similarly embedded in the communicat ion structure. The proximity relations so constructed are not, in general, transitive: that is, individuals A and B may be proximately related, and so may B and C, with A and C unrelated. A proximity relation is therefore not an equivalence relation, and cannot be described by disjoint equivalence classes of individuals. However, maximally connected subgroups, or cliques, can be constructed, although these subsets will in general intersect one with another. The number of such cliques generated by each proximity relation gives an indication of the complexity of structure associated with the relation. For example, a simple proximity structure would be one in which every individual was proximately related to every other individual. A clique program based on the procedure of Harary and Ross (1957) and presented as an algorithm by Doreian (1970) was used to generate the clique structure associated with each proximity relation (see Alt and Schofield (1975, 1978) for details of this program). A proximity relation can be regarded as a representation of some aspect of the deep social structure of an organisation: from this follows the notion of embedding proximity relations in one another, to determine whether they are different reflections of essentially the same underlying structure. The intersection between two proximity relations can be used to determine the coefficient of scalability between the two relations. The coefficients of