Christopher Wheat
Organizational Behavior PhD
Dissertation Chair: Prof. J. Podolney
Modeling the Structure of Social Organization
The idea of an organizational position-a bounded context populated by organizations that share common outcomes-figures centrally into a wide variety of organizational theories. While economic sociologists frequently employ this idea in theoretical and empirical work about organizations, these studies rarely approach the definition of these positions in a methodologically and theoretically rigorous way. This dissertation incorporates the theoretical development of the organizational position idea into a specific methodological approach grounded in the logic of probability theory in order to define the boundaries of the contexts that comprise these positions.
I employ two key ideas in defining the boundaries of organizational positions. The first idea concerns the network theoretic idea that organizations should be assigned to positions on the basis of the similarity their relationships to other organizational actors, a logic captured by the predictive modeling technique of stochastic blockmodeling. The second idea concerns the information theoretic concept of stochastic complexity. The stochastic complexity modeling approach provides a method grounded in probability theory of appropriately balancing the complexity of a structural model against its accuracy. Taken together, these two ideas form the basis of the stochastic structure modeling approach used in this dissertation to empirically assess the boundaries of organizational positions.
I use these ideas to address substantive questions from two distinct domains, each of which is based on the largely assumption that the boundaries organizational positions can be determined. I first use the stochastic structure modeling approach to define the boundaries of industries as the contexts that shape the degree of competition and constraint faced by organizations. I then show how these boundaries are implicated in defining a set of organizational positions that are consistent with the theory of structural autonomy. I also use the stochastic structure modeling approach to address the definition of economic locations in the world system of economic exchange. I identify the number of positions in the world system, show how the idea of a social role can be empirically contrasted with that of a social position within world system research, and assess the stability of the structure of international exchange over time.
