“A Large-Scale Comparative Study of Informal Social Networks in Firms,” authored by Lab Director Duncan Watts and coauthor Abigail Jacobs, has been published in Management Science. The paper provides an analysis of a unique data set of aggregated, anonymized email data from an enterprise email system that includes 1.8 billion messages sent by 1.4 million users from 65 publicly traded U.S. firms. Although preliminary, its results raise new questions for organizational theory as well as new issues for collecting, processing, and interpreting digital network data. To learn more about the study, read the full paper here.
