Intra-organizational two-mode networks analysis of a public organization

Abstract

The article focuses on the analysis of intra-organizational and two-mode networks of knowledge, resources and tasks. Each of these networks consists of a human and non-human actor in the terminology of the actor-network theory (ANT), or of only non-human actors. This type of research is rare in the theory of organization and management, even though the first article on meta-networks dates back to nearly two decades ago (Krackhardt & Carley, 1998). The article analyses the prominences and ties between particular network nodes (actors, knowledge, resources and tasks), assessing their effective use in an organization. The author selected a public organization operating in the university education sector, where saturation with communication, resource and knowledge-sharing are relatively high. The application of the network analysis provides a totally different perspective on an organization, taking into account the inter-relationship, which allows a holistic (complex) outlook on the analyzed object. Especially, as it measures particular nodes as related to one another, not as isolated variables, as in classical research, where observations are independent.