Why do so many organizations fail to mobilize the social networks of employees to respond to disruptions, innovate, and change? In Digital Relationships, Jason Davis argues that individual and organizational interests about networking can come out of alignment such that the network ties that individuals form are organizationally sub-optimal for achieving their most ambitious goals. Developing a new perspective about networks and organizations, he explains through network agency theory how network problems emerge, the role of digital technology adoption by organizations in amplifying misalignment, and the capacity of managers and function of the executive to resolve agency problems and mitigate their impact. Drawing on over a decade of qualitative research in US, Asian, and European ‘big tech’ companies and new analytical and computational modeling, this book offers new interpretations and solutions to the pathologies that emerge from organizationally detrimental networking behaviors and in the face of managerial interventions.
Table of Content
1. Networks are the Problem: Confronting the Social Capital Consensus2. Too Many Ties: Divergent Interests with the Falling Costs of Digital Networking
3. Ties Too Weak: Insufficient Firm-Specific Social Investments to Mobilize Diversity
4. Entrenched Brokers and Ossified Bridges: Monopolies of Information and Control
5. Scale Too Free: Negative Externalities of Inequality in Social Capital
6. Persistence: Managerial Intervention Transience and the Reemergence of Agency Problems
7. Agentic Function of the Executive: Strategic Social Capital and the Work-From-Home Experiment
8. Network Governance:Reinterpreting Organizational Design and Boundaries
9. Network Agency over the Life Cycle: Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystems
10. A Research Agenda: More Cases, More Models, More Experiments
About the author
Jason Davis is an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at INSEAD. His work has been published in top academic journals, such as theAdministrative Science Quarterly,
The American Economic Review, and the
Strategic Management Journal.
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