Enabling Knowledge Broker Analysis through Actor Clusters in Organizational Structures in Enterprise Social Media

Abstract

Knowledge brokers serve as facilitators of knowledge sharing. The extant literature calls for nuanced analyses of different organizational structures as the spaces knowledge brokers operate in. Our interest lies in formal, semiformal, and informal organizational network structures and in how knowledge brokers are positioned in them. In this paper, we outline a collaborative analysis method, with researchers from different disciplines working together in data sprints. The benefit of this process is that it enables analyzing large organizational networks with deep insights. Amplifying social network analysis with field knowledge offers a deeper understanding of the connections in the network. This paper describes the analysis process and proposes interdisciplinary data processing techniques. We applied the proposed method using an extensive empirical data set that includes intraorganizational social media interactions between employees in a global organization. Our analysis transforms enterprise social media data into a network model that describes an organization’s social structure.