Andrew Pilny

Two Paths Diverged: Examining the Antecedents to Social Entrepreneurship

This research examines the antecedents that motivate and prepare social entrepreneurs to begin social ventures. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 20 social entrepreneurs, this research reveals that there are two paths to social entrepreneurship: the activist path and the business path. Both activist and business social entrepreneurs were motivated by a family legacy or a transformative early adulthood experience as the moral basis for forming a social venture, and both suggested that prior work experience was instrumental in helping them launch their social venture. However, activist social entrepreneurs were likely to form their social venture as a continuation of their ongoing work on a social issue. In contrast, business social entrepreneurs’ first activity on a social issue was to form a social venture. This research suggests that these two different paths to social entrepreneurship result in different types of social ventures.

A Taxonomy of Communication Networks

Communication network research is increasingly being used across the communication discipline. However, most social network research is limited in its generalizability because it focuses on either a single network case or ego-centric network data. In order to generate knowledge across network studies, a mechanism is needed to synthesize. This chapter presents a taxonomy of communication relations, differentiating between communication fl ow, affi nity, representational, and semantic networks. Then, it demonstrates the utility of the taxonomy for synthesizing network research by reviewing 139 studies in communication journals, focusing on the antecedents, outcomes, and processes of each type of network.

Volunteer Science: An Online Laboratory for Experiments in Social Psychology

Experimental research in traditional laboratories comes at a significant logistic and financial cost while drawing data from demographically narrow populations. The growth of online methods of research has resulted in effective means for social psychologists to collect large-scale survey-based data in a cost-effective and timely manner. However, the same advancement has not occurred for social psychologists who rely on experimentation as their primary method of data collection. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of one online laboratory for conducting experiments, Volunteer Science, and report the results of six studies that test canonical behaviors commonly captured in social psychological experiments. Our results show that the online laboratory is capable of performing a variety of studies with large numbers of diverse volunteers. We advocate for the use of the online laboratory as a valid and cost-effective way to perform social psychological experiments with large numbers of diverse subjects.

Identification of Groups in Online Environments: The Twist and Turns of Grouping Groups

This study describes an approach to track groups over time as they participate in larger networks of groups. Groups were tracked in a Massive Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), a context typical of many online venues and similar to some situations in the real world. Based on social scientific theories the study identified possible avenues to detect groups, explored game logs to identify relevant variables for group detection, and developed an algorithm to detect groups from individual level data. This study demonstrates that it is possible to identify groups in MMORPG environments using available individual level data. The study has also captured some group dynamics that corresponds to existing real world examples, including changes in groups over time and development of larger groups through unification of smaller groups.

An Adapted Structurational Framework for the Emergence of Communication Networks

Although structuration theory (ST) has endured a considerable influence in communication research across various domains, there remains a paucity of quantitative empirical research using ST as a viable framework. The purpose of this article is to develop an adapted structurational framework to explain the emergence of communication networks. The adapted framework distinguishes between relational states/events and internal/external structural rules. For analysis, we introduce multipanel relational event modeling, a technique using processual inference that can empirically demonstrate the recursive nature of system and structure. As an introductory example of both the framework and method, we examined communication, using cell-phone data, of students living in the same dormitory from September 2008 through February 2009. Our results demonstrated how different structures (i.e., perceived social relations and internal/external structural rules) are reproduced and transformed over time. Our research has implications for communication research dealing with recursivity, event-driven network analysis, the changing nature of the phone call, and the promise of computational communication science.

A network under stress: using embeddedness to understand uncertainty management and resilience in campus emergencies

ABSTRACT Persistent school shootings have generated ongoing pressure to assess and enhance crisis communication effectiveness via strategies such as resilience-building and post-crisis restoration. A network perspective offers a robust, multilevel approach for examining complex information flows among community, campus, and individual actors affected by crises. Drawing on relational and structural embeddedness and Uncertainty Management Theory, we offer nine propositions that help explain structural and relational changes in a network over time. Although theoretically driven, these propositions are primarily functional, offering practical implications for safety officials and administrators trying to understand, prepare for, and respond to crises. Thus, we suggest measures and recommendations to improve information flow, uncertainty management, and resilience before, during, and after a crisis.

A Dynamic Social Network Experiment with Multi-team Systems

This paper describes the use of VBS High-Fidelity 3D Game to perform experiments on multi-team systems. Multi-team systems (MTS) are a natural part of human social phenomena and online social networks as people form groups with shared goals and interests. We gathered data on human players (on communications and interactions) who were engaged in a VBS game scenario. Using Relational Event Modeling (REM), we analyzed the results. The results suggest some synchronization and cross-team communication have both direct effects with team performance and, in some cases, can moderate the effect of false information in environments of uncertainty.

How Do SMOs Create Moral Resources? The Roles of Media Visibility, Networks, Activism, and Political Capacity

How is it that some social movement organizations (SMOs) receive more media attention, and are generally perceived as more influential, than others? The purpose of this study is to examine the antecedents of moral resources (media visibility and peer influence) among SMOs in the 1980s US national labor policy domain. Using theories of communication, social movements, and media effects, this research argues that the acquisition of moral resources is influenced by the accumulation of other types of resources. Our path model showed that organizational resources such as media visibility, political capacity, and communication network centrality positively predicted organizational peer influence. Moreover, communication network centrality was positively related to media visibility, and SMOs that used damaging activist tactics were more likely to be covered by the media. Our results suggest that communication theory can be used to expand upon theories of SMs and resources, and that SMOs seeking to develop moral resources should consider finding novel ways to externally attract media attention and internally build capacity.

SocialMapExplorer: visualizing social networks of massively multiplayer online games in temporal-geographic space

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) provide unique opportunities to investigate large social networks, such as player (working-group), trading, and communication (chat) networks. This paper presents a visualization tool -- SocialMapExplorer - that allows users to explore these networks over temporal-geographic space. Implemented on the GoogleMap framework, this web-based interactive tool applies visual features, including color, size, shape, weight and font, to represent various network features. Unlike other similar tools, SocialMapExplorer visualizes data on a real map and couples time and spatial information with other attributes. To meet the challenge of intensive computation, this tool runs on high performance computers. Three modules have been implemented: (1) NetViewer that analyzes network dynamics by visualizing social networks in time series; (2) GroupDetector that investigates group assembly and evolution by tracing groups in visualized data flow; and (3) CorrelationFinder that studies the correlation between selected census variables (such as age, gender, race, population, income, education, occupation, and marital status) and game-play variables (such as play time, play frequency, achievement, and loss) by overlapping the measurements of census data and game log data. We performed this study on EverQuestII (EQII) game logs. This demonstration of the tool shows how it can help us discover events that trigger a group to emerge, shrink, and expand, and explore the relationship between census data and game data. This paper presents the design of this visualization tool, demonstrates its functions on real game data, and discusses its applications to virtual social network analysis associated with temporal-geographic space.

A structurational group decision-making perspective on the commons dilemma: results from an online public goods game

ABSTRACT To expand upon perspectives on the commons dilemma, we developed an online experiment grounded in David Seibold and colleagues’ structurational perspective on group decision-making. We created manipulations based on three modalities of structure: dense versus sparse networks (domination), collective versus individual identity (signification), and social sanction versus non-social sanction (legitimation). The results revealed that modalities of signification positively influence contribution rates when participants were communicated information meant to stimulate a collective identity. In contrast to our hypotheses, individuals contributed more in sparse, rather than dense network structures. For managers of public goods, our results suggest that communication that emphasizes common identity may be important for mobilizing collective action and that they should also pay special attention to communication overload.