Plenumssitzung
1 : BIOTECHNOLOGIE
UND GESELLSCHAFT
Social Structure and Process in the Field of Biotechnology: Network Dynamics
Development of biotechnology as a knowledge-based industry involved organizational innovation in learning through networks of dense collaborative ties among organizations.
Powell, White and Koput trace the evolution of contractual collaborations in the biotechnical industry (e.g., number of organizations in the industry and their links) from 1988-99 in relation to firm-level financial and organizational changes. In doing so we present a dynamical "movie" of the periods and aspects of network evolution, beginning with implications of stable growth for network and structural change.
Parameters of growth in the earliest of these years entailed the rapid emergence of network configurations involving new forms of cohesive subgroups and collaborative centers as well as robust peripheries (university- and knowledge-centered localities) and catalytic agencies (such as NIH).
We show how these new organizational forms of doing business were concomitant with a phase transition from the classical "modern" corporation (e.g., Chandler 1990) to a network form of organization (Powell 1990), and analyze the various facets and phases of these changes.
This research was done with collaboration of Walter Powell and Ken Koput.
Douglas R. White is Professor of Social Sciences, UC Irvine, Graduate Director of Social Networks, member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, former Humboldt senior fellow at Cologne, external faculty at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes (Paris), and member of several working groups at the Santa Fe Institute.
His PhD at Minnesota involved work at Michigan and Columbia in mathematical sociology, mathematical psychology and anthropology.
He publishes in the fields of social structure/networks, modeling social systems and dynamics, and he co-edited Research Methods in Social Network Analysis (1991) and Kinship, Networks and Exchange (1998).
His current work models the network dynamics of changing institutional configurations such as the biotechnical industry and longitudinal network and demographic studies of human populations.
