Emma Spiro, Ryan Acton and Carter Butts published an article, “Extended structure of mediation: Re-examining brokerage in dynamics networks” in the upcoming issue of Social Networks. Their article revisits the concept of brokerage in social networks, elaborating on the concept of brokerage as a process. Spiro et al. develop a framework for measuring brokerage opportunities in dynamic relational data. Using data on emergent inter-organizational collaborations, they employ the dynamic brokerage framework to examine the relationship between organizational attributes and coordination in the evolving network. Comparing the findings of the process-based definition with traditional, static approaches, Spiro et al. identify important dimensions of organizational action that would be missed by the latter approach.
Their article can be found online here.