Individual cognitive structures and collaboration patterns in academia

Abstract

This article, elaborating on mutuality of knowledge and social structure theory borrowed from sociology of knowledge literature, where knowledge is perceived as an essentially social and societal category, develops a coherent research framework which relates cognitive structure and the collaboration patterns into an integrated socio-knowledge analysis of a given scientific community. The framework extends co-word analysis combining it with social network analysis. The framework is enhanced by introducing a novel model. The new model maps actors from co-authorship networks into a strategic diagram of scientists. The mapping is based on cohesiveness and pervasiveness of issues each author has published in the field. The exemplary longitudinal case from Turkey covers scientific publication activities in Turkish management academia spanning the years from 1922 until 2008. It is seen that, while within local community diffusion of management knowledge is lead by academicians with certain socio-cognitive properties, academicians publishing at international arena do not show any significantly differing socio-cognitive properties, instead, they are merely embedded in strongly connected groups. Leading academicians within local community, however, exhibit a common socio-cognitive structure relative to the rest of the community. They have more social ties and more diversified disseminated knowledge compared to the rest. Knowledge they disseminate is distinct compared to their peers in the network, they hold certain part of their knowledge exclusively, thus knowledge-wise they don’t resemble the rest, but they keep a level of common knowledge with the rest of the community.