Brian C. Britt

Theoretical implications addressing rural college students’ organ donation behaviors

The current study used the theory of planned behavior to examine rural college students’ attitudes, normative beliefs, and perceived behavioral control regarding intent to register as organ donors. This effort is done in light of a need to increase intervention efforts among college students, particularly those in rural areas where these undertakings may need to be tailored in grassroots approaches. The study made use of perceived behavioral control as a moderator and found partial support for the model. Findings offer results that scholars, practitioners, and educators can utilize for interventions.

Stepwise Segmented Regression Analysis: An Iterative Statistical Algorithm to Detect and Quantify Evolutionary and Revolutionary Transformations in Longitudinal Data

This chapter proposes an iterative statistical approach, based on the principles of stepwise and segmented regression, to detect and quantify evolutionary trends and revolutionary changes (breakpoints) in long-term processes. The resulting stepwise segmented regression analysis was initially developed to assess especially complex social systems such as behavioral changes across the Wikipedia editorial community.

Breakpoints and Concurrent Factors

Up to this point, we have articulated a synthesized model of organizational change, and we subsequently detailed some initial findings about the moments at which the organizational configuration of Wikipedia—or the manner in which that configuration was changing over time—shifted. In this chapter, we analyze the revisions made to key Wikipedia policy pages as well as contributions made to their associated “Talk” pages, in which editors discuss the revisions being made, in addition to larger societal events that may have affected Wikipedia. The findings of this archival search are used to assess the significant internal and external motors that acted upon the Wikipedia collaborative community to foster these configurational changes.

Organizational Configurations and Configurational Change

This chapter explores the area of organizational configurations and links it with the evolutionary and revolutionary changes that we may observe in those configurations. We start by assessing the model laid out by Mintzberg (1979), significantly expanding on it by developing a comprehensive protocol to align any given organization with Mintzberg’s theoretical archetypes. This is then connected, on both a conceptual level and a measurement level, with the evolutionary and revolutionary changes that we may observe in those configurations, thereby yielding a new approach for researchers to directly observe and comprehend the development of organizational configurations over time. This is a vital piece of our larger theoretical model that specifies the mechanisms through which social structuration occurs in online collaborative groups.

The Foundations of a Theoretical Model for Organizational Configurations and Change in Online Collaborative Processes

This chapter begins the process of intertwining the domains of organizational configurations and organizational change into a synthesized framework of configurational change motors. The goal is to articulate a comprehensive theoretical model that can bring the conversation about social structuration, covered in the previous chapters within a very broad and abstract terrain, to a more tangible and precisely specified reality. The first step is to identify specific types of system-level structuration, which in keeping with existing literature (e.g., Mintzberg 1979, 1989) we will call “organizational configurations.” Second, we will discuss the necessity and sufficiency of the configurations identified to date. Third, we will derive methods of translating the conceptual definitions of the configurations into specific operationalizable concepts. Fourth, we will lay the groundwork for the specific mechanisms by which configurations change and succeed each other over time (Van de Ven and Poole 1995), which will be further developed in Chap. 7.

Aligning Online Social Collaboration Data Around Social Order: Theoretical Considerations and Measures

Online media have revolutionized human interaction. Groups of people can rapidly converge, work on projects with little explicit coordination, and produce content that has immediate impact. Intellectual, analytic, or symbolic collaboration in academia, business, or even government is now almost inconceivable without online support. Work on text and narratives has been entirely transformed by Internet-based sites. Of these, wiki sites are the most successful and well known. Web-based wiki sites have greatly augmented if not supplanted traditional collaborative frameworks (Benkler, The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) for generating reference knowledge, documentation, and even education.

Social Structuration Online: Entropy and Social Systems

One of the most important goals of the present volume is to define and relate group structuration to other online organizational and interactional phenomena. Although structuration is a high-level concept that may hold different meanings for different people, within this research, the concept is quite simple and clear. In brief, structuration is equated with the concept of “signal” in information systems, as defined by Shannon and Weaver (1948). Structuration is meaningful order, so by Shannon’s logic, structure is the opposite of entropy. Since structure is measured using entropy, we may say that structure increases as the observed value of entropy decreases. Conceptually, this means that structure is captured in the negative by observing the degree to which the system is not random (noisy or disordered).

A Synthesized Theoretical Framework for Motors Driving Organizational Configurational Change

Now that we have a framework for understanding organizational configurations and the manner in which they change over time, we need to unite this with the forces that drive those configurational changes. To that end, this chapter introduces the concept of organizational change motors, as articulated by Van de Ven and Poole (1995), and then serves to synthesize the two historically distinct domains of organizational configurations and organizational change motors into a unified theoretical framework, using the basic constructs of evolution and revolution as a conduit for this theoretical integration. This new synthesized framework offers a fundamentally enhanced approach to examine the long-term transformation of organizations and to understand the motors that form and reconstitute organizational configurations throughout their development.

Wikipedia Evolution: Trends and Phases

In the previous chapters, we presented a theoretical framework to explain the emergence and transformation of complex organizational configurations from an integrated perspective. We suggested that structural differentiation is an early and constitutive process by which online social organizations emerge, grow, and become stable. In this chapter, we explore some empirically measurable trends on Wikipedia that more concretely reveal structural differentiation through the lens of organizational configurations. We analyze data across the five dimensions of inbound and outbound degree centralization, betweenness centralization, assortativity, and entropy to track the ways in which Wikipedia has changed over time. We also propose a statistical method that may be used to determine the moments at which internal and external phenomena triggered revolutionary shifts in an organization’s development, and we subsequently use that method to identify transformative changes in the social structure of the online group that built Wikipedia.

Analytic Investigation of a Structural Differentiation Model for Social Media Production Groups

In the previous chapters, we articulated the role of evolutionary processes on Wikipedia and similar social media production sites and then outlined the main reasoning behind using entropy as a measure of structuration. The main claim is that, just like many of self-organizing voluntary organizations, online social groups need to overcome the increasing costs of communication and coordination as they continue to grow and evolve, which they do via the emergence of leading contributors who work substantially more than their peers. In this chapter, we will look at the contours of leadership groups and at their temporal persistence, or stickiness, the latter of which we will assess via their turnover. We will further analyze the relationship between the evolution of group structuration (entropy) and elite stickiness in order to elucidate the role of elites in relation to the larger organization. Finally, we will examine the factors that explain how individuals advance to elite status, thereby adding a microlevel perspective to the meso- and macro-level dynamics under study.