We quantify a social organization's potentiality, that is its ability to attain different configurations. The organization is represented as a network in which nodes correspond to individuals and (multi-)edges to their multiple interactions. Attainable configurations are treated as realizations from a network ensemble. To have the ability to encode interaction preferences, we choose the generalized hypergeometric ensemble of random graphs, which is described by a closed-form probability distribution. From this distribution we calculate Shannon entropy as a measure of potentiality. This allows us to compare different organizations as well different stages in the development of a given organization. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated using data from 3 empirical and 2 synthetic systems.

To what extent is the citation rate of new papers influenced by the past social relations of their authors? To answer this question, we present a data-driven analysis of nine different physics journals. Our analysis is based on a two-layer network representation constructed from two large-scale data sets, INSPIREHEP and APS. The social layer contains authors as nodes and coauthorship relations as links. This allows us to quantify the social relations of each author, prior to the publication of a new paper. The publication layer contains papers as nodes and citations between papers as links. This layer allows us to quantify scientific attention as measured by the change of the citation rate over time. We particularly study how this change correlates with the social relations of their authors, prior to publication. We find that on average the maximum value of the citation rate is reached sooner for authors who either published more papers, or who had more coauthors in previous papers. We also find that for these authors the decay in the citation rate is faster, meaning that their papers are forgotten sooner.

We study the lock-in effect in a network of task assignments. Agents have a heterogeneous fitness for solving tasks and can redistribute unfinished tasks to other agents. They learn over time to whom to reassign tasks and preferably choose agents with higher fitness. A lock-in occurs if reassignments can no longer adapt. Agents overwhelmed with tasks then fail, leading to failure cascades. We find that the probability for lock-ins and systemic failures increase with the heterogeneity in fitness values. To study this dependence, we use the Shannon entropy of the network of task assignments. A detailed discussion links our findings to the problem of resilience and observations in social systems.

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Resilience denotes the capacity of a system to withstand shocks and its ability to recover from them. We develop a framework to quantify the resilience of highly volatile, nonequilibrium social organizations, such as collectives or collaborating teams. It consists of four steps: (i) delimitation, i.e., narrowing down the target systems, (ii) conceptualization, i.e., identifying how to approach social organizations, (iii) formal representation using a combination of agent-based and network models, (iv) operationalization, i.e. specifying measures and demonstrating how they enter the calculation of resilience. Our framework quantifies two dimensions of resilience, the robustness of social organizations and their adaptivity, and combines them in a novel resilience measure. It allows monitoring resilience instantaneously using longitudinal data instead of an ex-post evaluation.