Studying relationships in project management through social network analysis

Successful project management depends upon forming and maintaining relationships between and among project team members and stakeholder groups. The nature of these relationships and the patterns that they form affect communication, collaboration and resource flows. Networks affect us directly, and we use them to influence people and processes. Social Network Analysis (SNA) can be an extremely valuable research tool to better understand how critical social networks develop and influence work processes, particularly as projects become larger and more complex. This chapter introduces foundational network concepts, helps you determine if SNA could help you answer your research questions, and explains how to design and implement a social network study. At the end of this chapter, the reader can: understand foundational concepts about social networks; decide if SNA is an appropriate research methodology to address particular questions or problems; design and implement a basic social network study.

Collaboration on social network sites: Amateurs, professionals and celebrities

Amateurs are found in arts, sports, or entertainment, where they are linked with professional counterparts and inspired by celebrities. Despite the growing number of CSCW studies in amateur and professional domains, little is known about how technologies facilitate collaboration between these groups. Drawing from a 1.5-year field study in the domain of bodybuilding, this paper describes the collaboration between and within amateurs, professionals, and celebrities on social network sites. Social network sites help individuals to improve their performance in competitions, extend their support network, and gain recognition for their achievements. The findings show that amateurs benefit the most from online collaboration, whereas collaboration shifts from social network sites to offline settings as individuals develop further in their professional careers. This shift from online to offline settings constitutes a novel finding, which extends previous work on social network sites that has looked at groups of amateurs and professionals in isolation. As a contribution to practice, we highlight design factors that address this shift to offline settings and foster collaboration between and within groups.

Being online, living offline: The influence of social ties over the appropriation of social network sites

Research on social network sites has examined how people integrate offline and online life, but with a particular emphasis on their use by friendship groups. We extend earlier work by examining a case in which offline ties are non-existent, but online ties strong. Our case is a study of bodybuilders, who explore their passion with like-minded offline 'strangers' in tightly integrated online communities. We show that the integration of offline and online life supports passion-centric activities, such as bodybuilding.

"Hey world, take a look at me!": Appreciating the human body on social network sites

Social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook have the potential to persuade people to adopt a lifestyle based on exercise and healthy nutrition. We report the findings of a qualitative study of an SNS for bodybuilders, looking at how bodybuilders present themselves online and how they orchestrate the SNS with their offline activities. Discussing the persuasive element of appreciation, we aim to extend previous work on persuasion in web 2.0 technologies.

Teacher peer support in social network sites

This paper describes the types of support that teachers are accessing through the Social Network Site (SNS) 'Facebook'. It describes six ways in which teachers support one another within online groups. It presents evidence from a study of a large, open group of teachers online over a twelve week period, repeated with multiple groups a year later over a one week period. The findings suggest that large open groups in SNSs can be a useful source of pragmatic advice for teachers but that these groups are rarely a place for reflection on or feedback about teaching practice.

Co-creating games: A co-evolutionary analysis

ABSTRACT. The phenomenon of consumer co-creation is often framed in terms of whether either economic market forces or socio-cultural non-market forces ultimately dominate. We propose an alternate model of consumer co-creation in terms of co-evolution between markets and non-markets. Our model is based on a recent ethnographic study of a massively multiplayer online game through its development, release and ultimate failure, and cast in terms of two explanatory models: multiple games and social network markets. We conclude that consumer co-creation is indeed complex, but in ways that relate to both emergent market expectations and the evolution of markets, not to the transcendence of markets.

Co-creative expertise : Auran Games and Fury - a case study

This article discusses the ways in which the relations among professional and non-professional participants in co-creative relations are being reconfigured as part of the shift from a closed industrial paradigm of expertise toward open and distributed expertise networks. This article draws on ethnographic consultancy research undertaken throughout 2007 with Auran Games, a Brisbane, Australia based games developer, to explore the co-creative relationships between professional developers and gamers. This research followed and informed Auran’s online community management and social networking strategies for Fury (http://unleashthefury.com), a massively multiplayer online game released in October 2007. This paper argues that these co-creative forms of expertise involve co-ordinating expertises through social-network markets.

"Her lively Looks a sprightly Mind disclose, Quick as her Eyes, and as unfix'd as those." - looking, fashion media, and risk culture

This chapter investigates the phenomenon of fashion from the perspective of ‘the look.’ This is achieved by the wearer (as opposed to the designer) and also forms the basis of fashion media, where it represents the ‘decisive moment’ of photography. The chapter argues that the evolving ‘look’ of fashion can be analysed to identify tensions between novelty and emulation, the unique and the universal, in contemporary consumer culture and status-based social-network markets. It explores the work of fashion photographer Corinne Day and artist Olga Tobreluts to identify the theme of ‘risk culture.’

Дизайнът на взаимодействията, масовата комуникация и предизвикателствата на споделеното експертно знание (Interaction Design, Mass Communication And the Challenge of Distributed Expertise)

This paper considers some of the implications of the rise of design as a master-metaphor of the information age. It compares the terms 'interaction design' and 'mass communication', suggesting that both can be seen as a contradiction in terms, inappropriately preserving an industrial-age division between producers and consumers. With the shift from mass media to interactive media, semiotic and political power seems to be shifting too - from media producers to designers. This paper argues that it is important for the new discipline of 'interactive design' not to fall into habits of thought inherited from the 'mass' industrial era. Instead it argues for the significance, for designers and producers alike, of what I call 'distributed expertise' -including social network markets, a DIY-culture, user-led innovation, consumer co-created content, and the use of Web 2.0 affordances for social, scientific and creative purposes as well as for entertainment. It considers the importance of the growth of 'distributed expertise' as part of a new paradigm in the growth of knowledge, which has 'evolved' through a number of phases, from 'abstraction' to 'representation', to 'productivity'. In the context of technologically mediated popular participation in the growth of knowledge and social relationships, the paper argues that design and media-production professions need to cross rather than to maintain the gap between experts and everyone else, enabling all the agents in the system to navigate the shift into the paradigm of mass productivity.

Creative Industries : A New Direction?

This paper looks at the work of the ARC Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology. They have attempted to deal with some of the definitional and policy ambiguities surrounding the DCMS’s re-branding of ‘cultural industries’ as ‘creative industries’. The paper focuses on three central claims. First, that Art falls outside the creative industries; second, that the creative industries moves beyond a cultural policy paradigm towards that of innovation systems; third, that the notion of ‘social network markets’ represents the central defining characteristic of the creative industries. The paper suggests that the attempt to separate out art and culture from the creative industries is misplaced and represents a significant shift away from a longer trajectory of ‘cultural industries’ policies with some damaging consequences for cultural policy and creative businesses.

Where money and meanings meet : theorizing the emergence of new values in media and education

Recent developments in technology, globalization, and consumer activism have challenged the "broadcasting model" of natonally bounded, vertically integrated, monopolistic, expert-paradigm media industries, dedicated to supplying leisure entertainment to more or less passive consumers. Instead, attention has turned to globally traded formats, social network markets, consumer-created content, multiplatform "publication," and a semiotic long tail where niche representations can be as valuable as blockbusters. Such chenges are just as much a challenge to education as they are to business models. And education, both formal and informal, is a dynamic agent in these processes, participation, and creative content require a rethink of "studies" just as much as of "media."

Whose creative Industries?

In an era of hyper-specialization it is unusual to find such a range of concerns as creative economy, media studies, copyright law and 'area' studies, but at the same time it is impossible to do justice to specialist domains without knowing how they fit together.

Global Creative Industries

The creative industries are the subject of growing attention among policy-makers, academics, activists, artists and development specialists worldwide. This engaging book provides a global overview of developments in the creative industries, and analyses how these developments relate to wider debates about globalization, cities, culture and the global creative economy. Flew considers creative industries from six angles: industries; production; consumption; markets; places; and policies. Designed for the non-specialist, the text includes insightful and wide-ranging case studies on topics such as: fashion; design thinking; global culture; creative occupations; monopoly and competition; Shanghai and Seoul as creative cities; popular music and urban cultural policy; and the rise of “Nollywood”. Global Creative Industries will be of great interest to students and scholars of media and communications, cultural studies, economics, geography, sociology, design, public policy, and the arts. It will also be of value to those working in the creative industries, and involved in their development.

Chinese online literature : creative consumers and evolving business models

Purpose – The internet is transforming possibilities for creative interaction, experimentation and cultural consumption in China and raising important questions about the role that “publishers” might play in an open and networked digital world. The purpose of this paper is to consider the role that copyright is playing in the growth of a publishing industry that is being “born digital”. Design/methodology/approach – The paper approaches online literature as an example of a creative industry that is generating value for a wider creative economy through its social network market functions. It builds on the social network market definition of the creative industries proposed by Potts et al. and uses this definition to interrogate the role that copyright plays in a rapidly-evolving creative economy. Findings – The rapid growth of a market for crowd-sourced content is combining with growing commercial freedom in cultural space to produce a dynamic landscape of business model experimentation. Using the social web to engage audiences, generate content, establish popularity and build reputation and then converting those assets into profit through less networked channels appears to be a driving strategy in the expansion of wider creative industries markets in China. Originality/value – At a moment when publishing industries all over the world are struggling to come to terms with digital technology, the emergence of a rapidly-growing area of publishing that is being born digital offers important clues about the future of publishing and what social network markets might mean for the role of copyright in a digital age.