Who Thinks Who Knows Who? Socio-cognitive Analysis of Email Networks

Interpersonal interaction plays an important role in organizational dynamics, and understanding these interaction networks is a key issue for any organization, since these can be tapped to facilitate various organizational processes. However, the approaches of collecting data about them using surveys/interviews are fraught with problems of scalability, logistics and reporting biases, especially since such surveys may be perceived to be intrusive. Widespread use of computer networks for organizational communication provides a unique opportunity to overcome these difficulties and automatically map the organizational networks with a high degree of detail and accuracy. This paper describes an effective and scalable approach for modeling organizational networks by tapping into an organization´s email communication. The approach models communication between actors as non-stationary Bernoulli trials and Bayesian inference is used for estimating model parameters over time. This approach is useful for socio-cognitive analysis (who knows who knows who) of organizational communication networks. Using this approach, novel measures for analysis of (i) closeness between actors´ perceptions about such organizational networks (agreement), (ii) divergence of an actor´s perceptions about organizational network from reality (misperception) are explained. Using the Enron email data, we show that these techniques provide sociologists with a new tool to understand organizational networks.