Business Commons^™

The Structure Of Opportunity: Network Configuration And Career Mobility, Terri A. Scandura Phd

Management Faculty Articles and Papers

Within organizations, managers are constantly choosing with whom they will begin, continue or cease to interact (Fischer, 1977; Kaplan, 1984). Organizations have been defined as "fish nets" of interrelated offices, and can be viewed as social groupings with relatively stable patterns of interaction over time (Katz and Kahn, 1978; Weick, 1969). If such a model of organizing is to move beyond this metaphor, coherent frameworks, and accompanying methods of analysis capable of capturing these emergent processes are necessary. The social network perspective was proposed by Tichy, Tushman and Fombrun (1979) and has guided data collection and analysis on emergent network …