Summary of Social network

Social networks form the skeleton of the field and they are sources of distinctions among different categories of individuals and groups. There are two main branches of social network research.

Embeddedness

Embeddedness contracts with arm-length relationships. Arm-length market relationships are characterized by (Dyer and Singh,1988): 1) Nonspecific asset investments 2) Minimal information exchange 3) Separable technological and functional systems within each firm that are characterized by low levels of interdependence 4) Low transaction costs and minimal investment in governance mechanisms (Williamson, 1985)
There are four kinds of embeddedness: structural, cognitive, political, and cultural.
Network analysis focuses on modeling organizational field. Networks serve as source of information (Davis, Dickmann and Tinsley, 1994), resources (Burt, 1980), trust (Uzzi, 1996), or collusion (Baker and Faulkner, 1990).

Antecedents of embeddedness: The weaker the ability of prices to distill information, the more organizations will form embedded ties. The greater the level of embeddedness in an organization’s network, the greater the its economies of time. The greater the competitive advantage of achieving real-time change to environmental shifts or fashion-sensitive markets, the more network form organizations will dominate and producing efficiency than other organizational forms

Critics: What is important about the relationship is under theorized. First, we know network matters in collective action, but we do not know the underlying mechanisms.

Social tags

With the fast development of social network, one emerging area is social tagging. Online users try to assign different tags on the website where they can interact with each other. How the tagging behavior influence the formation of social category and how they motivate the innovation of new products receives relatively scant attentions.