TY - JOUR
T1 - Influence flows in the academy
T2 - Using affiliation networks to assess peer effects among researchers
AU - Rawlings, Craig M.
AU - McFarland, Daniel A.
N1 - Funding Information:
We wish to thank Skye Bender-deMoll, Linus Dahlander, Noah Friedkin, Ted Mouw, Walter Powell and the audiences of the Organizations and Networks workshop and Mimir Project meetings at Stanford University for useful comments on earlier drafts of this work. These data were collected by the Mimir Project conducted at Stanford University by Daniel McFarland, Dan Jurafsky, Chris Manning, and Walter Powell. This material is based upon work supported by the Office of the President at Stanford University and the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0835614 . Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Stanford University or the National. The first author also gratefully acknowledges the support of the IES postdoctoral program and the Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice (IREPP) at Stanford University Science Foundation.
PY - 2011/5
Y1 - 2011/5
N2 - Little is known about how influence flows in the academy, because of inherent difficulties in collecting data on large samples of friendship and advice-seeking networks over time. We propose taking advantage of the relative abundance of "affiliation network" data to assess aggregate patterns of how individual and dyadic characteristics channel influence among researchers. We formulate and test our approach using new data on 2034 faculty members at Stanford University over a 15-year period, analyzing different affiliations as potential influence channels for changes in grant productivity. Results indicate that research productivity is more malleable to ongoing interpersonal influence processes than suggested in prior research: a strong, salient tie to a colleague in an authority position is most likely to transmit influence, and most forms of influence are likely to spill over to behaviors outside those jointly produced by collaborators. However, the genders and institutional locations of ego-alter pairs significantly affect how influence flows.
AB - Little is known about how influence flows in the academy, because of inherent difficulties in collecting data on large samples of friendship and advice-seeking networks over time. We propose taking advantage of the relative abundance of "affiliation network" data to assess aggregate patterns of how individual and dyadic characteristics channel influence among researchers. We formulate and test our approach using new data on 2034 faculty members at Stanford University over a 15-year period, analyzing different affiliations as potential influence channels for changes in grant productivity. Results indicate that research productivity is more malleable to ongoing interpersonal influence processes than suggested in prior research: a strong, salient tie to a colleague in an authority position is most likely to transmit influence, and most forms of influence are likely to spill over to behaviors outside those jointly produced by collaborators. However, the genders and institutional locations of ego-alter pairs significantly affect how influence flows.
KW - Complex organizations
KW - Peer effects
KW - Research productivity
KW - Social networks
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U2 - 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2010.10.002
DO - 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2010.10.002
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:79953181601
SN - 0049-089X
VL - 40
SP - 1001
EP - 1017
JO - Social Science Research
JF - Social Science Research
IS - 3
ER -