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engineering design processes. Among these models, one of the most widely known is perhaps the one proposed by Pahl and Beitz [42]. It presents a systematic engineering design approach including four core design phases: product planning and clarifying the task, conceptual design, embodiment design, and detail design. Similarly, Ulrich and Eppinger [43] introduce a more refined design process by incorporating prototype testing, refinement, and production ramp-up into the original Pahl and Beitz approach. Since these two well-accepted design approaches were first proposed and later on become common design practice in industry, many

ZusammenfassungDurch das immense Wachstum von Web-basierten Diensten wie z. B. facebook.com gewinnt das Thema soziale Netzwerke gegenwärtig zunehmend an Bedeutung. Eine zentrale Herausforderung – u. a. für die erfolgreiche Umsetzung zahlreicher betriebswirtschaftlicher Maßnahmen wie z. B. Virales Marketing – stellt dabei die Identifikation derjenigen Schlüsselpersonen dar, die strukturell besonders gut in ein soziales Netzwerk eingebunden sind. Hierfür wurde in der Social Network Analysis eine Vielzahl von Maßen zur Quantifizierung der Vernetzung der einzelnen Akteure eines sozialen Netzwerks entwickelt. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird im vorliegenden Beitrag der aktuelle Stand der Forschung im Hinblick auf Vernetzungsmaße in sozialen Netzwerken aufgezeigt. Angesichts stark variierender Erkenntnisse zur Güte verschiedener Vernetzungsmaße verfolgt der Beitrag zudem das Ziel, die enorme Relevanz einer reflektierten Anwendung der existierenden Vernetzungsmaße zu illustrieren. Hierfür werden fünf der in der Social Network Analysis am häufigsten diskutierten Vernetzungsmaße anhand von drei einfachen allgemeinen Eigenschaften im Hinblick auf das Verhalten von Vernetzungsmaßen analysiert.AbstractSocial networks are currently gaining increasing impact in the light of the ongoing growth of web-based services like facebook.com. One major challenge for the economically successful implementation of selected management activities such as viral marketing is the identification of key persons with an outstanding structural position within the network. For this purpose, social network analysis provides a lot of measures for quantifying a member’s interconnectedness within social networks. In this context, our paper shows the state of the art with regard to centrality measures for social networks. Due to strongly differing results with respect to the quality of different centrality measures, this paper also aims at illustrating the tremendous importance of a reflected utilization of existing centrality measures. For this purpose, the paper analyzes five centrality measures commonly discussed in literature on the basis of three simple requirements for the behavior of centrality measures.

Working conditions are increasingly unpredictable, complex, and ungovernable creating severe health risks for employees and negative economic consequences for both corporations and society. Considering the growth in understanding human psychology and sociology, and the progression in measuring working conditions and health, this phenomenon is most perplexing. The enigma has yielded interest in a field known as sustainable work systems, where the challenge is to organize work in a manner that is both beneficial for the business and for its employees. In an attempt to shed light on the growing issue, this dissertation outlines the features of a model intended to capture conditions of organization where learning is of paramount importance, and where organization is conceptualised using interaction as the foundation. One central question concerns which forms of interactions and co-operations replace traditional structures in organizations. Another relevant question, linked to the former, concerns the way in which these structures shape conditions of organization, learning, efficiency, and effectiveness. A combination of research methods has been employed to provide an enhanced picture of this inquiry. Four corporate sub-units have been subject to a cross-sectional study. These sub-units were chosen by middle managers of a corporation because they excelled in an organizational reform that was initiated two years prior. During 2004, a survey was constructed and distributed to all employees in these four sub-units. Data regarding the sub-units’ efficiency and effectiveness has been collected; and, interviews with managers leading the organizational change have been conducted. The two papers included in this thesis disclose four distinctly different approaches to organizational design. All four sub-units have separate conceptions of function and organization, although the guiding principles prescribed by top-management were identical for each of the four first-line managers who were leading the change. Three of the four sub-units have made more pervasive change efforts, and have a higher degree of learning and development, efficiency and effectiveness. The results of this thesis suggest that interaction serves as a vehicle for shaping organizational conditions and outcomes. As a consequence of the chosen design, interaction varied between sub-units, thus influencing conditions of organization, learning, efficiency and effectiveness.

Word of mouth (WOM) communication is a major part of online consumer interactions, particularly within the environment of online communities. Nevertheless, existing (offline) theory may be inappropriate to describe online WOM and its influence on evaluation and purchase. The authors report the results of a two-stage study aimed at investigating online WOM: a set of in-depth qualitative interviews followed by a social network analysis of a single online community. Combined, the results provide strong evidence that individuals behave as if Web sites themselves are primary “actors” in online social networks and that online communities can act as a social proxy for individual identification. The authors offer a conceptualization of online social networks which takes the Web site into account as an actor, an initial exploration of the concept of a consumer–Web site relationship, and a conceptual model of the online interaction and information evaluation process.

With the strong ongoing push toward investment in and deployment of electronic healthcare (e-healthcare) systems, understanding the factors that drive the use of such systems and the consequences of using such systems is of scientific and practical significance. Elaborate training in new e-healthcare systems is not a luxury that is typically available to healthcare professionals---i.e., doctors, paraprofessionals (e.g., nurses) and administrative personnel---because of the 24 × 7 nature and criticality of operations of healthcare organizations, especially hospitals, thus making peer interactions and support a key driver of or barrier to such e-healthcare system use. Against this backdrop, using social networks as a theoretical lens, this paper presents a nomological network related to e-healthcare system use. A longitudinal study of an e-healthcare system implementation, with data gathered from doctors, paraprofessionals, administrative personnel, patients, and usage logs lent support to the hypotheses that: (1) ingroup and outgroup ties to doctors negatively affect use in all user groups; (2) ingroup and outgroup ties to paraprofessionals and administrative personnel positively affect use in both those groups, but have no effect on doctors' use; and (3) use contributes positively to patient satisfaction mediated by healthcare quality variables---i.e., technical quality, communication, interpersonal interactions, and time spent. This work contributes to the theory and practice related to the success of e-healthcare system use in particular, and information systems in general.

With the rapid development of transportation and modern communication technology, “tourism flow” plays an important role in shaping tourism’s spatial structure. In order to explore the impact of an urban tourism flow network on tourism’s spatial structure, this study summarizes the structural characteristics of the tourism flow networks of 43 scenic spots in Nanjing from three aspects—tourism flow network connection, node centrality, and communities—using cellular signaling data and the social network analysis method. A comparative analysis revealed the tourism flow network structures of residents and non-local tourists. Our findings indicated four points. Firstly, the overall network connectivity was relatively good. Core city nodes displayed high spatial concentration and connection strength. However, suburban nodes delivered poor performance. Secondly, popular nodes were intimately connected, although there were no “bridging” nodes. Lesser-known nodes were marginalized, resulting in severe node polarization. Thirdly, regarding the network community structure, the spatial boundary between communities was relatively clear; the communities within the core city were more closely connected, with some parts encompassing suburban nodes. Most suburban communities were attached to the communities in the core area, with individual nodes existing independently. Fourthly, the primary difference in the tourism flow network structures between residents and non-local tourists was that the nodes for residents manifested a more balanced connection strength and node centrality. Core communities encompassed more nodes with more extensive coverage. Conversely, the nodes for non-local tourists showed wide discrepancies in connection strength and node centrality. Furthermore, core communities were small in scale with clear boundaries.

With the rapid development of Internet technology, online social networks (OSNs) has become one of the main ways for people to develop social activities. In order to maintain and strengthen interpersonal relationships, users are willing to share personal behaviors, feelings and other things through OSNs. Whether these resources reveal private information or not depends on the appropriateness of the access control policies set by the owner. However, with the increasing number of friends and complex relationships, it becomes more and more difficult for OSNs users to set appropriate access control policies. Aiming at above problems, a smart access control method for online social networks is proposed based on SVM algorithm to realize smart access control on the basis of integrating relationship types and description information of published content as eigenvectors. The experimental results show that this mechanism can automatically recommend the list of visible friends according to the content published by users and the relationship between users and friends, allowing users to modify the list to obtain the final access control policy, which can effectively protect users’ privacy information.

With the development of social networking big data, social network group decision-making (SN-GDM) has been widely applied in many fields. This paper focuses on three main components: (1) the determination of the decision makers’ (DMs) weights based on different social influence; (2) the anti-deception mechanism; and (3) the persona method. We introduce the TrustRank algorithm and the persona method into SN-GDM. Based on the TrustRank algorithm, both trusted and deceptive DMs in a seed set are artificially identified and given initial static scores to derive the influence of each DM. Additionally, the personamethod is introduced to cluster DMs and achieve personalized decision-making. Further, we present a numerical example and comparison to demonstrate the efficiency of the framework in coping with non-socially shared preferences in SN-GDM. As expected, our findings indicate that our framework reduces the influence of deceptive DMs on the decision results.

With modern enterprises continuing to grow in size and complexity, there is a pressing need to make their transformation, management and evolution more understandable and rigorous. In this paper, we argue that viewing enterprises as system-of-systems (SoS) can potentially provide a fresh perspective and unique insights into understanding organizational and operational issues surrounding modern enterprises. We claim that, both as a modeling construct and as a system abstraction, the notion of SoS is well-suited to studying, analyzing and characterizing the structural and behavioral aspects of modern enterprises. Motivated by the potential synergy between these two independent disciplines while recognizing the nascent state of the SoS body of knowledge, we propose a new research direction in applying systems thinking to understanding enterprises and, at the same time, improving the state-of-the-art in enterprise transformation, management, and evolution.

With efforts to de-layer organizations and reduce functional boundaries, coordination increasingly occurs through networks of informal relations rather than channels tightly prescribed by formal reporting structures or detailed work processes. However, while organizations are moving to network forms through joint ventures, alliances, and other collaborative relationships, executives generally pay little attention to assessing and supporting informal networks within their own organizations. Social network analysis is a valuable means of facilitating collaboration in strategically important groups such as top leadership networks, strategic business units, new product development teams, communities of practice, joint ventures, and mergers. By making informal networks visible, social network analysis helps managers systematically assess and support strategically important collaboration.

When an organization pursues the goals specific to its environment, networks are constructed to gain various resources from other collaborators. However, most individual studies on inter-organizational network have taken a simplified view of relationships among member organizations by focusing on a static and single level linkage. This paper proposes a multi-level approach to integrate resource, organization and network levels and explores the relationship between these levels. This enables us to identify a set of important micro, meso and macro linkages between resource, organization and network. Operational measures and results are illustrated via a case study from an incubator system of Xi'an High-tech Park of China. The case study demonstrates that one level triggers the changes of other levels.

When a reforming technology company holding high valuable intellectual property tries to solve financial struggle by transferring patents, he needs to know who the right transferee is. Kodak was selected as research target. Ego patent citation network is formed by its core technology, `digital image', as an ego center. This study adopts knowledge redundancy analysis to identify the position of company in two-dimensional diagram of technology knowledge status and technology knowledge reliability. Moreover, this study selected nine important companies in order to understand the correlation of indicator variance with Kodak before and after patent transference. The results show: (a) The digital mobile communication device industry is most potential for Kodak to release digital image technology, (b) During the process of Kodak's reformation, Apple is the most suitable company for Kodak to release patent. (c) Apple's technology knowledge status increases after patents transference, but it does not shake the leadership of Kodak. (d) From the view of Kodak after patent release, Apple's common internal knowledge and common external knowledge with Kodak increase significantly.

What is the Internet doing to local community? Analysts have debated about whether the Internet is weakening community by leading people away from meaningful in‐person contact; transforming community by creating new forms of community online; or enhancing community by adding a new means of connecting with existing relationships. They have been especially concerned that the globe‐spanning capabilities of the Internet can limit local involvements. Survey and ethnographic data from a “wired suburb” near Toronto show that high‐speed, always‐on access to the Internet, coupled with a local online discussion group, transforms and enhances neighboring. The Internet especially supports increased contact with weaker ties. In comparison to nonwired residents of the same suburb, more neighbors are known and chatted with, and they are more geographically dispersed around the suburb. Not only did the Internet support neighboring, it also facilitated discussion and mobilization around local issues.

Well before the coming of the Internet, strong ties with friends and relatives stretched beyond the neighborhood: the traditional domain of community. Phones, cars and planes allowed people to have contact over substantial distances. But the mere fact that ties stretched over long distances does not tell us the extent to which distance mattered for contact and support in pre-Internet days. Although, scholars have mused about this question, they have not provided empirical evidence. This paper applies multi-level analysis to assess the extent contact and support declines with distance. It shows a marked drop in the frequency of face-to-face contact at about 5 miles. The frequency of contact continues to decrease steadily further away, with substantial declines happening at about 50 and 100 miles. Distance affects telephone contact somewhat differently, with a marked drop only happening at about 100 miles. Distance also has a significant impact on providing tangible support. As our data were gathered in 1978 in the Toronto area of East York, they allow comparisons with how relationships have changed in light of new forms of communication, such as the Internet and mobile phones.

We study the emergence of organizational forms, focusing on two mechanisms—reconfiguration and transposition—that distinguish the founding models of the first 26 biotechnology companies, all created in the industry's first decade, from 1972 to 1981. We analyze rich archival data using hierarchical cluster analysis, revealing four organizational variants of the dedicated biotech firm (DBF). Three were products of reconfiguration, as executives from Big Pharma used past practices to incorporate new science. One DBF variant resulted from ‘amphibious’ scientists who imported organizing ideas from the academy into their VC-funded start-ups. We argue that such transpositions are fragile, yet charged with generative possibilities. Copyright © 2012 Strategic Management Society.

We study evolutionary games in real social networks, with a focus on coordination games. We find that populations fail to coordinate in the same behavior for a wide range of parameters, a novel phenomenon not observed in most artificial model networks. We show that this result arises from the relevance of correlations beyond the first neighborhood, in particular from topological traps formed by links between nodes of different degrees in regions with few or no redundant paths. This specificity of real networks has not been modeled so far with synthetic networks. We thus conclude that model networks must be improved to include these mesoscopic structures, in order to successfully address issues such as the emergence of cooperation in real societies. We finally show that topological traps are a very generic phenomenon that may arise in very many different networks and fields, such as opinion models, spread of diseases or ecological networks.

We study evolutionary game dynamics on structured populations in which individuals take part in several layers of networks of interactions simultaneously. This multiplex of interdependent networks accounts for the different kind of social ties each individual has. By coupling the evolutionary dynamics of a Prisoner's Dilemma game in each of the networks, we show that the resilience of cooperative behaviors for extremely large values of the temptation to defect is enhanced by the multiplex structure. Furthermore, this resilience is intrinsically related to a non-trivial organization of cooperation across the network layers, thus providing a new way out for cooperation to survive in structured populations.

We propose a general procedure for locating the boundary of a network and a second, related, procedure for discerning the boundaries within a network. The first is an expanding (snowball) selection procedure. The second requires the specification of two critical parameters: the value of k for a k-core and the threshold, w, for the quantitative magnitude of network ties. The use of these parameters generates a sequence of nested cores. Single sector and multi-sector social service inter-agency networks are used to illustrate the procedures.

We investigated how positive affectivity influences people's perception of the patterns of social relationships around them. Positive affectivity was measured as trait positive affect. The outcome variable was accuracy in the perception of informal patterns of social interaction in a group (i.e., the group's network structure). Data on the perception of the relationships of friendship and work-related advice at an Italian university were collected from 24 members. Positive affectivity improved the accuracy of people's perception of the friendship network linking all respondents to each other (global accuracy), but hindered the accuracy of the perception of one's personal advice ties (local accuracy). These results suggest that, although happy people may feed unrealistic images of their personal social connections, their superior ability to develop an accurate picture of the broader dynamics of social interaction among people around them may give them an important advantage for social and professional accomplishment in a given social setting.