Networks and Innovation in the Production of Communication: Explaining Innovations in U.S. Electoral Campaigning From 2004 to 2012

Abstract

We outline a network analytic framework for analyzing the production of communication. In our framework, individuals—in part the products of the history of their social and professional ties—merge from various fields and a medley of prior production experiences within organizations to produce communicative innovations. Organizations with individuals who have diverse backgrounds and significant overlap in work experiences will be more innovative. We demonstrate this through a network analysis of the professional biographies of 629 staffers on U.S. presidential campaigns from 2004 to 2012. Democratic staffers came from more diverse organizations and shared significant overlap in prior experiences than their Republican counterparts. Through interview data, we argue that this in part explains Democratic innovativeness in technology during this period.

Understanding the Internal and External Communicative Drivers of Organizational Innovativeness

“…Building on research that conceptualizes organizational innovation as communication (Majchrzak et al, 2004; Monge et al, 1992; Rice, 1987) and the recombinative-based innovation theory (Kreiss & Saffer, 2017; Leonardi, 2014), this study examines the internal and external communicative drivers of organizational innovativeness. Overall, survey data from 293 U.S. nonprofits highlighted that interorganizational partnerships and proactiveness influence administrative innovativeness and interorganizational partnerships, ICT-mediated knowledge sharing, and proactiveness influence technological innovativeness.…”

“…Hence, innovative organizations usually have access to more diverse information. Based on this theory, scholars considered communication essential to recombination processes (Damanpour, 1991; Kreiss & Saffer, 2017; Leonardi, 2014). Specifically, the central tenet of this line of research is that intra- and inter-organizational communication influence an organization’s ability to assimilate and recombine existing information for innovation.…”

“…This study is grounded in the recombination-based organizational innovation theory, which posits that innovation is the outcome of blending existing knowledge to generate new ideas (Hargadon & Sutton, 1997; Kreiss & Saffer, 2017; Leonardi, 2015). Both internal and external communication may influence recombination processes (Damanpour, 1991).…”

Navigating the brogrammers and the boys’ club: Women’s representation and experiences in political technology

“…The dataset of staffers who either worked in campaign divisions dedicated to technology, digital, data, or analytics or who had these words in their titles also contains staffers’ employment biographies drawn from publicly available websites. Previous analyses of this dataset ( N = 629) focused on innovation in the context of campaigning and was limited to data through the 2012 cycle (for a detailed description of this dataset, see Kreiss, 2016; Kreiss and Jasinski, 2016; Kreiss and Saffer, 2017). For this study, we updated the dataset through the 2016 cycle ( N = 995) and explicitly analyzed hiring by gender for the first time.…”

“…A total of 15 women thought that men in senior leadership assumed they were less technically skilled than men who they worked with, even if they had extensive industry experience. A number of women who came from outside of the political field to a presidential campaign cited their lack of campaign experience as one reason they refrained from sharing their expertise, which in turn limited the opportunities for innovation that people joining campaigns from outside of the field can offer (Kreiss and Saffer, 2017).…”