Network Dynamics and Community Evolution: Coordination, Development and Resilience

Motivation and background
Periods of crisis reveal with clarity how the ability of contemporary societies to confront global emergencies depends on the capacity of local organizations to coordinate their actions and plans, and work together to share their proprietary knowledge, resources, and best practices. In decentralized economic systems designed to measure and reward individual performance, understanding how heterogeneous organizations may be able to work together to address pressing societal problems remains an unresolved but pressing challenge. It is also the main objective of this work.Main questionsThe project is designed to address questions concerning: -Coordination mechanisms: How - i.e., through what mechanisms do collective actors that are both heterogeneous and changing achieve coordination? -Knowledge distribution: How does coordination affect community-level distribution of knowledge and resources within and across corporate boundaries?-Benefits of collaboration: When - i.e., under what conditions is coordination between organizations beneficial – and for whom?-Community resilience: What coordination mechanisms bolster institutional and community resilience when confronted with uncertainty stemming from system-level disruption?The research project emphasizes organizational and institutional change across multiple levels as the central process that provides conceptual coherence in addressing the questions outlined above. Heterogeneity and change are the keywords upon which the research work is developed.Overarching goalThe project intends to establish an empirically grounded and theoretically inspired understanding of coordination as a network-based process emerging from dependence and exchange relations between organizations. Innovative statistical models are developed to connect the overarching theoretical framework of the study to complex micro-level data produced by the interaction of health care organizations involved in a collective process of collaborative care. Empirical settingThe empirical analyses at the heart of the project are designed to reveal the micro-mechanisms of exchange, dependence, collaboration, and coordination within a field of health care organizations in a regional community located in Southern Europe. The information basis of the project is both large, as well as rich in detail. The data for the project include information available on each single individual admitted as patient in the hospitals within the regional health care system. Approximately 3.5 million hospital admission events were recorded during the 20-year period of covered by the study. The interorganizational network of interest emerges from individual acts of collaboration revealed by interhospital patient referral and sharing decisions.Main objectivesObjective one is to articulate a set of testable hypotheses about how the multilevel mechanisms linking change in internal organizational structures and change in interorganizational networks shape each other and affect coordination within institutional fields.Objective two is to develop the necessary statistical tools needed to connect the theoretical narrative about relational coordination to the complex, dynamic, multilevel data generated by the evolutionary development of the organizational field. Objective three is to demonstrate the empirical value of the new theoretical narrative (objective one) when coupled with the statistical modelling tools developed to enable analysis (objective two) of dynamic network data. The analytical focus will be on how coordination and organizational change mechanisms (as identified in objective 1 and specified in objective 2) respond to disruptive community-level change caused by natural disasters, financial crises, and epidemiological emergencies.