ABSTRACT
Cross-cultural network ties have been shown to improve decision-making, creativity, conflict-resolution and use of collaborative technologies. Nevertheless, cultural barriers are difficult to overcome. We used data from an internal Social Networking System (SNS) in a large global company to see if membership in the same company might reduce the effect of cultural homophily. We found no effect. However, when we focused on members of 87 distributed workgroups, we found that the effect of cultural differences actually reversed, indicating greater cultural diversity in online friendship ties than observed in the company at large. We discuss alternative explanations for this finding and the implications for work environments in global companies.
- Anne Archambault and Jonathan Grudin. 2012. A longitudinal study of facebook, linkedin, & twitter use. in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Daniel J Brass. 1985. Men's and women's networks: A study of interaction patterns and influence in an organization. Academy of management journal, 28(2): p. 327-343.Google Scholar
- Ronald S Burt. 2005, Brokerage and closure: An introduction to social capital: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
- Aaron Clauset, Mark EJ Newman, and Cristopher Moore. 2004. Finding community structure in very large networks. Physical review E, 70(6): p. 066111.Google Scholar
- Rob Cross and Jonathon N Cummings. 2004. Tie and network correlates of individual performance in knowledge-intensive work. Academy of management journal, 47(6): p. 928-937.Google Scholar
- Rob Cross, Thomas H Davenport, and Susan Cantrell. 2003. The social side of performance. MIT Sloan Management Review, 45(1): p. 20-22.Google Scholar
- Rob Cross and Lee Sproull. 2004. More Than an Answer: Information Relationships for Actionable Knowledge. Organization Science, 15(4): p. 446-462. Google ScholarDigital Library
- David Dekker, David Krackhardt, and Tom AB Snijders. 2003. Mulicollinearity Robust QAP for Multiple Regression. in CASOS Working Paper. Carneige Mellon University.Google Scholar
- David Dekker, David Krackhardt, and Tom AB Snijders. 2007. Sensitivity of MRQAP tests to collinearity and autocorrelation conditions. Psychometrika, 72(4): p. 563-581.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Joan DiMicco, David R Millen, Werner Geyer, et al. 2008. Motivations for social networking at work. in Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work: ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nathan Eagle, Michael Macy, and Rob Claxton. 2010. Network diversity and economic development. Science, 328(5981): p. 1029-1031.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kate Ehrlich, Michael Muller, Tara Matthews, et al. 2014. What motivates members to contribute to enterprise online communities? in Proceedings of the companion publication of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing: ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J Alberto Espinosa, Sandra A Slaughter, Robert E Kraut, et al. 2007. Team knowledge and coordination in geographically distributed software development. Journal of Management Information Systems, 24(1): p. 135-169. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Samer Faraj and Lee Sproull. 2000. Coordinating expertise in software development teams. Management science, 46(12): p. 1554-1568. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Shelly D Farnham and Elizabeth F Churchill. 2011. Faceted identity, faceted lives: social and technical issues with being yourself online. in Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work: ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Thomas MJ Fruchterman and Edward M Reingold. 1991. Graph drawing by forcedirected placement. Software: Practice and experience, 21(11): p. 11291164. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Mark S Granovetter. 1973. The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology: p. 1360-1380.Google Scholar
- Ido Guy, Michal Jacovi, Noga Meshulam, et al. 2008. Public vs. private: Comparing public social network information with email. in Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work: ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Aric A. Hagberg, Daniel A. Schult, and Pieter J. Swart. 2008. Exploring network structure, dynamics, and function using NetworkX. in Proceedings of the 7th Python in Science Conference (SciPy2008). Pasadena, CA, USA.Google Scholar
- Esther Hauk and Hannes Mueller. 2013. Cultural leaders and the clash of civilizations. Journal of Conflict Resolution: p. 0022002713503793.Google Scholar
- James D Herbsleb and Deependra Moitra. 2001. Global software development. Software, IEEE, 18(2): p. 1620. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pamela J Hinds, Kathleen M Carley, David Krackhardt, et al. 2000. Choosing work group members: Balancing similarity, competence, and familiarity. Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 81(2): p. 226-251.Google Scholar
- Lester Holtzblatt, Jill L Drury, Daniel Weiss, et al. 2013. Evaluating the uses and benefits of an enterprise social media platform. J. of Social Media for Organizations, 1(1).Google Scholar
- Samuel P Huntington. 1993. The clash of civilizations? Foreign affairs: p. 22-49.Google Scholar
- Samuel P Huntington. 1996, The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order: Penguin Books India.Google Scholar
- Herminia Ibarra. 1992. Homophily and differential returns: Sex differences in network structure and access in an advertising firm. Administrative science quarterly: p. 422-447.Google Scholar
- Herminia Ibarra. 1995. Race, opportunity, and diversity of social circles in managerial networks. Academy of management journal, 38(3): p. 673-703.Google Scholar
- Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris. 2003. The true clash of civilizations. Foreign policy: p. 63-70.Google Scholar
- Todd M Johnson and Brian J Grim. 2008. World Religion Database. Leiden/Boston: Brill.Google Scholar
- Sara Kiesler and Jonathon N Cummings. 2002. What do we know about proximity and distance in work groups? A legacy of research. Distributed work, 1: p. 57.Google Scholar
- Adam M Kleinbaum, Toby E Stuart, and Michael L Tushman. 2013. Discretion within constraint: Homophily and structure in a formal organization. Organization Science, 24(5): p. 1316-1336.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Gueorgi Kossinets and Duncan J Watts. 2009. Origins of homophily in an evolving social network1. American Journal of Sociology, 115(2): p. 405-450.Google ScholarCross Ref
- David Krackhardt. 1988. Predicting with networks: Nonparametric multiple regression analysis of dyadic data. Social Networks, 10(4): p. 359-381.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Robert E Kraut, Paul Resnick, Sara Kiesler, et al. 2012, Building successful online communities: Evidencebased social design: Mit Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Paul M Leonardi. 2014. Social media, knowledge sharing, and innovation: Toward a theory of communication visibility. Information Systems Research, 25(4): p. 796-816. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tara Matthews, Jilin Chen, Steve Whittaker, et al. 2014. Goals and perceived success of online enterprise communities: what is important to leaders & members? in Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems: ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J Miller McPherson and Lynn Smith-Lovin. 1987. Homophily in voluntary organizations: Status distance and the composition of face-to-face groups. American sociological review: p. 370-379.Google Scholar
- Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook. 2001. Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27: p. 415-444.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Michael Muller, Kate Ehrlich, Tara Matthews, et al. 2012. Diversity among enterprise online communities: collaborating, teaming, and innovating through social media. in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Michael Muller, Werner Geyer, Todd Soule, et al. 2014. Geographical and organizational distances in enterprise crowdfunding. in Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing: ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gary M Olson and Judith S Olson. 2000. Distance matters. Human-Computer Interaction, 15(2): p. 139178. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Michael Quinn Patton. 2002, Qualitative Research & Evaluation Methods. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.Google Scholar
- Souren Paul and Priya Seetharaman. 2004. Cultural Diversity, Conflict and Team Facilitation in Global Virtual Teams-a Research Model. AMCIS 2004 Proceedings: p. 65.Google Scholar
- Souren Paul, Priya Seetharaman, Imad Samarah, et al. 2004. Impact of heterogeneity and collaborative conflict management style on the performance of synchronous global virtual teams. Information & Management, 41(3): p. 303-321. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Praveen Pinjani and Prashant Palvia. 2013. Trust and knowledge sharing in diverse global virtual teams. Information & Management, 50(4): p. 144-153. Google ScholarDigital Library
- William M Rand. 1971. Objective criteria for the evaluation of clustering methods. Journal of the American Statistical association, 66(336): p. 846-850.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ray Reagans and Bill McEvily. 2003. Network structure and knowledge transfer: The effects of cohesion and range. Administrative science quarterly, 48(2): p. 240-267.Google Scholar
- Jörg Reichardt and Stefan Bornholdt. 2006. Statistical mechanics of community detection. Physical review E, 74(1): p. 016110.Google Scholar
- Martin Ruef, Howard E Aldrich, and Nancy M Carter. 2003. The structure of founding teams: Homophily, strong ties, and isolation among US entrepreneurs. American sociological review: p. 195-222.Google Scholar
- Pnina Shachaf. 2008. Cultural diversity and information and communication technology impacts on global virtual teams: An exploratory study. Information & Management, 45(2): p. 131-142. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cuihua Shen and Peter Monge. 2011. Who connects with whom? A social network analysis of an online open source software community. First Monday, 16(6).Google Scholar
- Bogdan State, Patrick Park, Ingmar Weber, et al. 2015. The Mesh of Civilizations in the Global Network of Digital Communication. PLoS One, 10(5): p. e0122543.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Charles Steinfield, Joan M DiMicco, Nicole B Ellison, et al. 2009. Bowling online: social networking and social capital within the organization. in Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Communities and technologies: ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jennifer Thom-Santelli, David R Millen, and Joan M DiMicco. 2010. Characterizing global participation in an enterprise SNS. in Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Intercultural collaboration: ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jennifer Thom-Santelli, David R Millen, and Darren Gergle. 2011. Organizational acculturation and social networking. in Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work: ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- John C Turner and Katherine J Reynolds. 2001. The social identity perspective in intergroup relations: Theories, themes, and controversies. Blackwell handbook of social psychology: Intergroup processes, 4: p. 133-152.Google Scholar
- Hao-Chuan Wang, Susan R Fussell, and Dan Cosley. 2011. From diversity to creativity: Stimulating group brainstorming with cultural differences and conversationally-retrieved pictures. in Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work: ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M McLure Wasko and Samer Faraj. 2000. 'It is what one does': why people participate and help others in electronic communities of practice. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 9(2): p. 155-173.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Daniel M Wegner. 1987. Transactive memory: A contemporary analysis of the group mind, in Theories of group behavior. Springer. p. 185-208.Google Scholar
- Jiang Yang, Zhen Wen, Lada Adamic, et al. 2011. Collaborating globally: culture and organizational computer-mediated communications.Google Scholar
- Y Connie Yuan and Geri Gay. 2006. Homophily of Network Ties and Bonding and Bridging Social Capital in ComputerMediated Distributed Teams. Journal of ComputerMediated Communication, 11(4): p. 10621084.Google Scholar
Recommendations
A cross-cultural framework for protecting user privacy in online social media
WWW '13 Companion: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide WebSocial media has become truly global in recent years. We argue that support for users' privacy, however, has not been extended equally to all users from around the world. In this paper, we survey existing literature on cross-cultural privacy issues, ...
Cultural trails in social media
CSCW Companion '14: Proceedings of the companion publication of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computingStudying how culture influences users in online social media has increased the interest of several sectors such as the advertising industry, search engines and corporations. As a consequence, anthropological and computational models need to interact and ...
Investigating Homophily in Online Social Networks
WI-IAT '10: Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 01Similarity breeds connections, the principle of homophily, has been well studied in existing sociology literature. %Several studies have observed this phenomena by conducting surveys on human subjects. These studies have concluded that new ties are ...
Comments