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Goodbye UK, welcome (back) Germany

I’ve recently switched universities and moved from the United Kingdom to Germany. I’m now enrolled in a program with the title ‘Dynamic Capabilities and Relationships’. The graduate school is run jointly by the Europa-Universität Viadrina, situated in Frankfurt (Oder), and the German Graduate School of Management and Law in Heilbronn. We’re a team of six researchers: five PhD students and one PostDoc. The aim of the doctoral program is to create knowledge about how organizations achieve and sustain competitive advantage in rapidly changing environments through relationships with other organizations and stakeholders. You can see the people involved in the picture below (photo credit: EUV press office, Heide Fest).

15_04_2011eoegad-kolleg_dcr

I’m excited to be part of this newly established program and, luckily, will be able to continue the work on my original research proposal which I developed in Nottingham. It suits well within the realm of the program, primarily because my focus has been on organizational efficiency and relationships from the very start.

I want to take this chance to thank my previous supervisors, John Richards and Iain Coyne, for their great support. Both of them have guided my thinking and my professional development significantly.

@cshirky on Institutions vs. Collaboration

This is a very enjoyable Ted talk by Clay Shirky which he delivered in 2005 (!). He speaks about how collaborative tools are changing the way human affairs are conducted. His main argument is that new technologies drive down coordination costs and replace institutional planning with looser types of coordination. He uses examples of Flickr, Meetup and online support groups. His talk also helps to understand the rationale behind the open-source movement. The way Clay talks about ‘tagging’ and content being produced or categorized by end-users immediately made me think of the mechanisms of emergence which I came across in Andrew McAfee‘s works before.

via ted.com

List of Social Network Courses in Europe

One particularly useful source of information that I draw on frequently is the SOCNET mailing list. Sometime towards the end of last year Christopher Tunnard collected information on the different types of social network courses being offered internationally. He consequently collected the data in a spreadsheet and you can now browse all courses by institution, instructor, category and name. I think this is pretty helpful when you’re trying to locate a course near you in a particular academic field. So, if you’re based in Europe and you’re interested in organization studies, psychology and communications – just like myself – you may find the following courses insightful:

Aarhus University: Introductory Social Network Analysis & Organizational Network Analysis

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona: Theory, Methods and Applications of Social Networks (Summer School)

University of Essex: Introduction & Advanced Social Network Analysis (Summer School)

University of Glasgow: Assessing the Impact of Social Networks on Organizational Performance

University of Greenwich: Business Networks

Universität Trier: Sum­mer School on So­ci­al Net­work Ana­ly­sis

Tilburg University: Interorganizational Relationships

Call for Talks: InterFace 2011

And here’s another recommendation: This time it’s not for a journal submission, but instead for an event that I find particularly interesting due to the format chosen by the organizers. The InterFace 2011 will take place this summer in London and is a mix of short PhD talks (2 minutes), workshops (including SNA) and an unconference (see Wikipedia article if you haven’t heard the term before). The InterFace is supposed to bring together researchers from the fields of technology and humanities. Deadline for submission of abstracts is March 11, 2011.

Call for Talks

A core component of the programme will be a lightning talks session in which each participant will make a two-minute presentation on their research. The session will be lively and dynamic. Each presentation must be exactly two minutes long, making use of necessary, interesting, appropriate, or entertaining visual or sound aids, and condensing a whole Ph.D’s worth of ideas and work into this short slot.

Participants will be able to join workshops in:

  • network analysis;
  • bibliographic software;
  • data visualisation;
  • linked data.

There will be talks on:

  • user studies and social research;
  • discourse analysis in science and technology;
  • how to get your work published;
  • how to apply for research funding.

There will also be two keynote talks given by speakers whose work marks the leading edge of technology in scholarship and practice. The speakers will be:

  • Steven Scrivener (University of Arts London): Design research and creative production

Finally, the symposium will conclude with an unconference; a participatory, collaborative, and informal event in which the form and content is decided on by participants as it unfolds and in which discussion and production is emphasised over presentation and analysis. Participants may wish to share their own skills, learn a new skill, establish and develop a collaborative project, or hold a focused discussion.

via interface2011.org.uk