New perspectives on organitzational design based on the analysis of complex communication networks

Identifier:  TDX:290

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX290

Authors:  Guimerà Manrique, Roger

Abstract:
The typical chemical company is large, usually with thousands of employees. According to<br/>data from the European Union, in 1990 almost 70% of the total turnover generated by the<br/>chemical industry corresponded to companies with more than 250 employees. The remaining<br/>30% corresponded, in similar amounts, to small companies with less than 50 employees and<br/>to medium sized companies with 50 to 250 employees. Indeed, although some products have<br/>regional markets, chemical industry is essentially global and is dominated by large<br/>multinationals like Bayer, with 117,000 employees, BASF, with 93.000 employees, DuPont,<br/>with 79.000 employees, or Dow Chemical, with 50.000 employees. Specially for such large<br/>companies, organizational design and human capital management play a key role, as<br/>important, at least, as technology or management of material resources. A substantial part of<br/>the human workforce of such a company is devoted to information processing rather than to<br/>'make' or 'sell' products in the narrow sense. However, most formal analysis of<br/>organizations have downplayed communication and information processing and focused on<br/>issues related to individual incentives. Only in the last decade, the importance of<br/>communication processes in organizations has started to be understood, mainly in the<br/>economics literature.<br/>Parallel to these efforts to understand the role of communication in organizations, the<br/>appearance and fast development of huge technology-based communication networks such as<br/>the Internet, as well as their inherent complex structure and dynamics, has contributed to<br/>awaken the interest of the scientific community in the so-called --complex networks'.<br/>Actually, the study of networks was already a topic by itself in social sciences and in<br/>mathematics. However, recent studies on these technology-based communication networks as<br/>well as the discovery of surprising properties in big and complex networks in fields as diverse<br/>as biology, physics, computer science, engineering or economics, has generated a great<br/>interest. In particular, statistical physics has played a particularly important role in<br/>understanding some of the properties of such networks. The reason is that some of the tools<br/>derived to understand complex collective behavior in physical systems (that differ from the<br/>addition of the individual behaviors of the parts of the system) are applicable in the field of<br/>complex networks.<br/>The present work uses ideas from both the economics literature and complex networks<br/>literature to understand the role of communication processes in organizations. The problem is<br/>tackled from a double perspective: theoretical and empirical. From the theoretical point of<br/>view, we propose and study a general and simple model for communication processes. With<br/>the understanding obtained from the model, we address the problem of finding optimal<br/>communication networks. From the empirical point of view, we study the complex<br/>communication network of real organizations and we obtain information about the structure<br/>of the different communities in the organization. This information can be used as a<br/>quantitative and objective indicator of the status and evolution of the organization.