Four fundamentals of networks

Claire Reinelt and I just contributed a chapter, "Social Networks," to appear in Political and Civic Leadership, edited by Richard Couto and produced by Sage Publications.

Political and Civic Leadership provides a comprehensive undergraduate-level overview of the field of leadership and includes 100 chapters in two volumes. We are happy to be included in an all-star cast of contributors (academics and practitioners of leadership); and we are also happy to be done!

Richard has structured the book as a reference, with each chapter standing on its own, so that readers can flip to a topic of interest (e.g., "decisions," "ethics," "globalization," "philanthropy") without having to read the preceding 500 pages. Nevertheless, there is an overarching structure to the 100 chapters that is not alphabetical. They are divided into these 11 thematic sections:

1. Introduction To Politics And Civic Leadership
2. Philosophy And Theories Of Political And Civic Leadership
3. Purposes Of Political And Civic Leadership
4. The Failure Of Politics
5. The Processes Of Political And Civic Leadership
6. The Institutions Of Political And Civic Leadership
7. The Contexts Of Public Leadership
8. The Psychology Of Public Leadership
9. The Tasks And Tools Of Political And Civic Leadership
10. The Competencies Of Public Leadership
11. Depictions Of Public Leadership

Our chapter will appear in Section 9: "The Tasks and Tools of Political and Civic Leadership."

The writing process helped us to deepen the foundations of our framework of four kinds of leadership networks. We considered three different perspectives, each of which describes a different set of four fundamentals of networks:

Kilduff and Tsai describe four orienting concepts of network thinking:

• Embeddedness: How are organizations and behavior influenced by social relations?
  
• Social Capital: What is the value of a person's connections to others?
  
• Centrality: What is the influence of a person according to his position?
  
• Structural Holes: Where are there gaps between distinct social groups?
  

Borgatti and Foster describe four primary aspects of the network paradigm, based on the following two questions: First, Do we care more about improving performance internally, or expanding impact externally? Second, Do we care more about the structural position of individuals, or the flow of communication? These priorities give us four categories:

• Social access to resources: Focused on communication flow and internal performance
  
• Structural capital: Focused on network position and internal performance
  
• Environmental shaping: Focused on network position and external impact
  
• Contagion: Focused on communication flow and external impact
  

In our work, we have encountered four main types of leadership networks:

• Peer leadership networks: Focused on building trust among leaders
  
• Organizational leadership networks: Focused on leveraging network position
  
• Field-policy leadership networks: Focused on shaping the environment
  
• Collective leadership networks: Focused on unleashing innovation
  

Each of the above "four fundamentals of networks" is a list that stands on its own. In the process of writing our chapter for Sage, we synthesized them all into this chart:


What does all that mean? Mostly these two things: (1) more blogging from me soon, with case studies from each of the quadrants above, and (2) pondering why the above four quadrants do not correspond to my beloved "holy trinity of network power," nor to the esteemed standard text SNA: Methods and Applications by Wasserman and Faust.

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