Personal Communication Ties and Organizational Collaborations in Networks of Science, Education, and Business

Abstract

The literature suggests that the success of innovation clusters is based on personal networks that connect members of scientific, educational, and business organizations, stimulating more formalized cross-boundary collaborations between the three sectors. But it is still unclear if such organizational collaborations actually correspond with these personal ties and which aspects of personal communication are most strongly associated with organizational collaborations. To investigate these issues, the authors applied network analysis to study an innovation cluster in Algarve, Portugal. They found that cross-boundary organizational collaborations corresponded with personal ties. Moreover, they found that collaborations appeared to correlate most strongly with emotional attachments between individuals.

Chapter 1: What Are We Really Teaching? Revisiting Technical and Professional Communication�s Pedagogical Training

“…Not knowing a researcher/author's self-ascribed identify is not necessarily a problem, but when values, attitudes, and perceptions of a localized group are discussed, readers may wonder about how the writer's positioning as a local and cultural insider and/or outsider shapes their interpretations. For example, Nikita Basov and Vera Minina (2018), affiliated with a Russian university, used interview data from another study to analyze collaborations in Portugal in their article on professional networks (also a discipline-spanning project). The study is interesting and well written but leads to questions about how the researchers addressed a complexity of multiple cultural identities and positionalities in their data interpretation.…”

Chapter 6: Technical Communication Reimagined Through a Socio-Technical Problem-Solving Lens

“…Not knowing a researcher/author's self-ascribed identify is not necessarily a problem, but when values, attitudes, and perceptions of a localized group are discussed, readers may wonder about how the writer's positioning as a local and cultural insider and/or outsider shapes their interpretations. For example, Nikita Basov and Vera Minina (2018), affiliated with a Russian university, used interview data from another study to analyze collaborations in Portugal in their article on professional networks (also a discipline-spanning project). The study is interesting and well written but leads to questions about how the researchers addressed a complexity of multiple cultural identities and positionalities in their data interpretation.…”

Affordance in Socio-Material Networks: A Mixed Method Study of Researchers' Groups and Analog-Digital Objects

“…Socio-material approaches attempt to understand the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in professionals' activities (Orlikowski, 2007). This provides insights on the importance of personal communication and social interaction processes for the cluster and shows the high relevance of network analysis for studying this case (Basov and Minina, 2018). In short, the question is whether individuals choose their objects because of the similarity of their characteristics, in other words, a sort of contagion (Basov, 2018).…”