subscribe to this page
Tornikoski and Newbert’s Networks, Networking Activity, and Organizational Emergence focuses primarily on leveraging social networks to cultivate and/or catalyze organizational emergence. Despite the piece’s narrow focus, one may extract many corollaries to general social networking. The two authors suggest that network size and quality are particularly important to the acquisition of resources. Moreover, one may gain legitimacy and elevate his social status through association with quality contacts. Multiple hypotheses also illuminate the nature of social networking’s origins, particularly those that reference the valuation of social networks as determined by the initial size of the network and initial accessibility of resources. Most compelling, content is the primary predictor of an entrepreneur (and his) emergence – not the structure of the network. That is to say, a social network’s associations are less important than “what he/she is able to access from them.”
Tornikoski and Newbert’s article struck me, largely because of the perceived relationship between an entrepreneurial organization and individual social networking user. The former is an organic institution, erected for a particular purpose to a specific niche. The latter is similar: created from relative “scratch” for multiple end goals (sense of community, assertion of identity, etc.) in specific spaces (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Moreover, the article uproots the commonly held belief that one’s social group peers dictate online social networking behavior (e.g. peers determine social norms online, which render which types of content are appropriate and which are condemnable). Rather, the dynamic is more intricate: the subjective – and differentiable – value of each network association, as perceived by the individual social networker, determines their influence on the social networking that takes place. Thus, the relationship is more active from the perspective of the individual user, as opposed to a submissive role, where the social group mandates the individual’s behavior. Such uprooting also unsettles the oft-referred “sense of community” that inspires many to engage in social networking activities. If one is extrapolating various pieces of information for their own utility, then values of community submit to the more selfish wants of personal gain.
