This article examines how Instant Messaging (IM) systems help employees of a Korean organization improve their relationships with their coworkers within and across organizational boundaries—within departments, between departments, and outside the organization. We briefly review literature about IM in developing working relationships and build our research questions. We then provide data analysis results based on a survey and structured interviews. Subsequently, in an exploratory case study of two individuals, we extend the analysis of departmental boundaries by including hierarchical levels, job profiles, and different communication purposes. Quantitative Social Network Analysis and visualization are used to analyze the communication pattern of the two individuals.

T he capabilities offered by digital communication are leading to the evolution of new network structures that are grounded in communication patterns. As these structures are significant for organizations, much research has been devoted to understanding network dynamics in ongoing processes of electronic communication. A valuable method for this objective is Social Network Analysis. However, its current focus on quantifying and interpreting aggregated static relationship structures suffers from some limitations for the domain of analyzing online communication with high volatility and massive exchange of timed messages. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a method for event-based dynamic network visualization and analysis together with its exploratory social network intelligence software Commetrix. Based on longitudinal data of corporate email communication, the paper demonstrates how exploration of animated graphs combined with measuring temporal network changes identifies measurement artifacts of static network analysis, describes community formation processes and network lifecycles, bridges actor level with network level analysis by analyzing the structural impact of actor activities, and measures how network structures react to external events. The methods and findings improve our understanding of dynamic phenomena in online communication and motivate novel metrics that complement Social Network Analysis.

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While research on organizational online networking recently increased significantly, most studies adopt quantitative research designs with a focus on the consequences of social network configurations. Very limited attention is paid to comprehensive theoretical conceptions of the complex phenomenon of organizational online networking. We address this gap by adopting a theoretical framework of the deep structure of organizational online networking with a focus on their emerging meaning for the employees. We apply and assess the framework in a qualitative case study of a large-scale implementation of a corporate social network site (SNS) in a global organization. We reveal organizational online networking as a multi-dimensional phenomenon with multiplex relationships that are unbalanced, primarily consist of weak ties and are subject to temporal change. Further, we identify discourse drivers and information retrievers as two mutually interdependent actor roles as an explanation for uneven levels of user contributions to the SNS. Based on our analysis, we elicit abstract order principles, such as topical discourses, and identify transactive memory theory as a potent explanation of the evolving interaction structures. We finally discuss how the deep structure framework can contribute to future research on organizational networks.

Despite growing interest in delineating the social identity of Information Systems (IS) research and the network structures of its scholarly community, little is known about how the IS community network is shaped by individual conceptions and what motivates IS researchers to engage in research collaboration. Using an exploratory theoretical framework that is based on three dimensions of social capital theory, we examined 32 years of scientific co-authorship in an international IS researcher community. We formulated propositions to empirically examine the multi-level relationships between personal drivers and the resulting complex network organization of the IS community. Our propositions are refined with qualitative interviews and tested using a survey. This process revealed a collaborative research culture with several individual dispositions, including a strategic structural focus, a cognitive focus and a relational focus. These exist among actors displaying a range of differing behaviours such as active engagement and passive serendipity. Our study indicates individual differences at the conception stage of engaging in academic collaboration impact on the resulting network-level configuration. We identified that regional preference, maturity life cycles and lack of smallworld properties highlight the important role of senior members as structural backbones and brokers within the IS community.