Amsterdam Business School

In this article we seek to understand and clarify the contribution of the multifaceted concept of sociality towards the design of social software systems. Our premise is that it is not software as such that is social, but the free choice of people to engage in social activities. Paraphrasing Wenger (1998): sociality cannot be designed; it can only be designed for. We adopt a soft systems approach to cope with the loosely defined concepts of social software. The paper's main contribution to the field consists of the theoretical work on the sociality based conceptual model, identifying if and to what degree software systems can trigger social behavior, and the design framework that stretches beyond the more traditional functionality-based approaches and focuses on the realms of sociality. We consider this orientation toward sociality, not functionality, a valuable contribution to the field of study.

THE MARKET FOR KNOWLEDGE. Every day billions of people and organizations exchange information to maintain and develop their knowledge bases. This huge network of social interaction can be seen as 'a market for knowledge' where information users, information suppliers, and infomediairies transact information freely or at a price. This knowledge market is full of initiatives and entrepreneurship. Many new, but also existing organizations see new opportunities, facilitate the sharing of dispersed information and thus enable the emergence of communities of knowing. These organizations are distinguished into 13 different kinds of infomediaries. How can these developments be explained? What are their implications? And what can be expected of the nearby future? In this article, these questions are dealt with by taking three economic theories of organization into account: the transaction cost approach, and the resource-based and knowledge-based views of the firm. The goal is to show the growing maturity of the knowledge market. This offers organizations all kinds of opportunities to enrich the way they usually organize their knowledge management activities. Knowledge initiatives often take place within organizational

If knowledge cannot be managed, what can knowledge management possibly mean for organizations? In this paper, knowledge management is viewed as an organizational discipline bridging information demand and supply in support of learning processes within organizations. Its object is the information transaction space, the vast and chaotic network of information exchange necessary to achieve coordinated action between resources that can be deployed in many ways and for different purposes. A dynamic framework for managing the information transaction space is developed and grounded in economic theory, integrating the coordination, cost, and learning perspectives on the subject. This framework extends the usual market-hierarchy dichotomy in economic theory by distinguishing four equally efficient, yet differentiated governance structures for knowledge management. We argue that the allocatively, but in particular adaptively efficient economic development of organizations is dependent upon their management's 'interpretative f lexibility' while managing the information transaction space. Organization members learn and managers have to learn how they learn best. We also argue that insofar as economic growth is increasingly fueled by ideas and knowledge and less by traditional resources, the dynamic ability to make the best use of the information transaction space is a defining competitive dimension of any organization.

This paper outlines a research in progress set to study network effects in social media. The focus is on outlining the theoretical framework in which this study is embedded. The concepts of cumulative network effects and segmentive network effects are introduced to explain the processes by which social media can generate and maintain both a larger network of members (an online city) and a more personalized space within that larger network (an online neighborhood). Taking an actor network approach, it is theorized that cumulative and segmentive network effects are generated by unique assemblages of humans and objects engaged in meaningful epistemic relationships. This study contributes to theory by considering how the two network effects can be simultaneously fostered on the same platform and by taking technology into account as an active actor in online human activities.

Graphs offer a natural abstraction for modeling complex real-world systems where entities are represented as nodes and edges encode relations between them. In such networks, entities may share common or similar attributes and may be connected by paths through multiple attribute modalities. In this work, we present an approach that uses semantically meaningful, bimodal random walks on real-world heterogeneous networks to extract correlations between nodes and bring together nodes with shared or similar attributes. An attention-based mechanism is used to combine multiple attribute-specific representations in a late fusion setup. We focus on a real-world network formed by restaurants and their shared attributes and evaluate performance on predicting the number of reviews a restaurant receives, a strong proxy for popularity. Our results demonstrate the rich expressiveness of such representations in predicting review volume and the ability of an attention-based model to selectively combine individual representations for maximum predictive power on the chosen downstream task.

This thesis is a collection of four chapters based on four empirical studies carried out in close collaboration with my supervisor and co‐author Nachoem Wijnberg. Each of these studies has the Dutch film industry as its empirical setting. In this thesis three different research methodologies were applied. First, interviews with Dutch film producers and directors were held in order to unravel how these individuals manage their professional industry network. Second, using statistical social network analysis an effort was made to model the evolution of collaboration networks of producers, directors and scriptwriters. Third, multiple regression analysis was used to determine the relative value of different types of reputations in attaining investment capital.

Many studies focus on the relationship between social networks and performance. I study networking behavior as an antecedent of tie formation among entrepreneurs in business incubators. I distinguish between two types of networking behavior: individual networking orientation or building potentially valuable ties for personal gain, and tertius iungens orientation or facilitating tie formation between others. I find that both types of networking behavior are positively related with the number of business partners to whom entrepreneurs give business assignments. Contrary to expectations, I find no relationship between networking behavior and the number of business partners from whom entrepreneurs receive business assignments.

Project-based organizations in the film industry usually have a dual-leadership structure, based on a division of tasks between the dual leaders – the director and the producer – in which the former is predominantly responsible for the artistic and the latter for the commercial aspects of the film. These organizations also have a role hierarchically below and between the dual leaders: the 1st assistant director. This organizational constellation is likely to lead to role conflict and role ambiguity experienced by the person occupying that particular role. Although prior studies found negative effects of role conflict and role ambiguity, this study shows they can also have beneficial effects because they create space for defining the role expansively that, in turn, can be facilitated by the dual leaders defining their own roles more narrowly. In a more general sense, this study also shows the usefulness of analyzing the antecedents and consequences of roles, role definition, and role crafting in connection to the behavior of occupants of adjacent roles.

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We study nascent project-based enterprises (PBEs) through the lens of upper echelons and institutional theory. We analyse the interplay between the different role-congruent reputations of their project entrepreneurs and the institutional endorsement of their project idea, theorizing how these affect PBEs’ ability to attract private investments. In the context of the Italian film industry, we find that the commercial reputation of the project entrepreneur in the producer role is crucial for attracting investors, while the artistic reputation of the project entrepreneur in the creative director role is crucial for attaining institutional endorsement of the project idea. Finally, we find that the effect of the commercial reputation of the project entrepreneur in the producer role on attracting investments is mediated by the institutional endorsement. We contribute to the literature on PBEs by demonstrating how specific combinations of project entrepreneurs’ roles and (role-congruent) r...

Many studies focus on the relationship between social networks and performance. I study networking behavior as an antecedent of tie formation among entrepreneurs in business incubators. I distinguish between two types of networking behavior: individual networking orientation or building potentially valuable ties for personal gain, and tertius iungens orientation or facilitating tie formation between others. I find that both types of networking behavior are positively related with the number of business partners to whom entrepreneurs give business assignments. Contrary to expectations, I find no relationship between networking behavior and the number of business partners from whom entrepreneurs receive business assignments.

The main aim of this article is to study the extent to which the project-based organization (PBO) and the latent organization determine the actual behavior of actors in a project-based industry and how this is mediated by the types of contracts and rewarding practices these organizational forms allow. Labor contracts connected to the PBO are mostly transactional in nature, while the members of the latent organization are linked by relational contracts. Interviews with Dutch film producers show that the transactional contracts connected to the PBO are less important than the relational contracts connected to the latent organization in governing the actual behavior of the involved actors. Relational contracts that structure relationships in the latent organization allow flexible rewarding practices, just as in `normal' organizations. In turn, employees prove willing to assist the organization in handling environmental uncertainty by making resources available without insisting on ...

Although nascent ventures have not yet developed a performance-based reputation, the individual reputations of their founders, based on the performance of their earlier ventures, can function as important signals to investors. Selection system theory distinguishes between different types of reputations as well as different types of investors, in order to analyze how particular types of reputations affect the investment behavior of particular types of investors. The empirical setting of this paper is the Dutch film industry, in which we study the impact of different types of reputations of producers and directors on the investment decisions of the three main investors.

Reputations of organizations and its individual members are valuable resources that help new organizations to get access to investment capital. Reputations, however, can have different dimensions. In this paper, we argue that an individual's reputation along a particular dimension will have a positive effect on the behavior of investors when it is role congruent. In addition, we argue that also scoring favorably on the role-incongruent dimension at the same time-or, in other words, engaging in reputational category spanning-will weaken the positive effect of the role-congruent reputation. Our empirical setting is the film industry where we study the effect of the two main dimensions of reputation in cultural industries, artistic and commercial, of both directors and producers on the size of the investment by distributors. In this study, artistic reputation is based on professional critics' reviews and commercial reputation on box office performance of the films in which individuals were involved in the past. We find that the commercial reputation of a film producer based on past box office performance has a positive effect on the size of the investment by film distributors. In addition, we find that directors who at the same time combine both a favorable commercial as well as an artistic reputation actually receive a lower investment from film distributors.

This study uses the panel data social network analysis program SIENA to estimate the effect of actor reputation derived from past performance on alliance formation, while controlling for other constant actor attributes and network position. The authors distinguish between individual reputation based on the past performance of the organizations the individual actor has been involved in, and composite reputation that takes into account reputation spillover effects from the similarly constituted reputations of past alliance partners. The empirical setting is the project-based film industry, which can be regarded as a constantly changing network of alliances. The study focuses on artistic reputation, based on the reviews of earlier films, and finds that the strength of that reputation and closeness in the network of past alliances are strong predictors of alliance formation. The study finds weak evidence of actors with similar reputations being more likely to form alliances with each ot...

Project-based organizations in the film industry usually have a dual-leadership structure, based on a division of tasks between the dual leaders – the director and the producer – in which the former is predominantly responsible for the artistic and the latter for the commercial aspects of the film. These organizations also have a role hierarchically below and between the dual leaders: the 1st assistant director. This organizational constellation is likely to lead to role conflict and role ambiguity experienced by the person occupying that particular role. Although prior studies found negative effects of role conflict and role ambiguity, this study shows they can also have beneficial effects because they create space for defining the role expansively that, in turn, can be facilitated by the dual leaders defining their own roles more narrowly. In a more general sense, this study also shows the usefulness of analyzing the antecedents and consequences of roles, role definition, and role...