Dynamics of Organizational Networks in USA and China

Abstract

Network analysis offers helpful insights to identify and evaluate the nature of organizational relationships. As a result, a lot of work has used network analysis to investigate and measure the main structural properties of the networks governing organizational relationships. In this thesis, we use GDELT, a data set that includes events collected from various sources of web news, to analyze the structure of different networks that represent the relationships between the organizations in two countries, namely USA and China. The main finding of this thesis is to demonstrate the potential benefit of using network-analysis techniques on the GDELT dataset. Specifically, by using these techniques, we found results suggesting that the government has a large influence on the events that happened between organizations through the network. Additionally, we found that the government was a dominant factor in most of the interactions among the organizations during 1980s and 1990s. However, since the beginning of 2000s, the interactions among organizations increased steadily over the years, eventually reaching a point at which the dominance of government is mostly diminished. On the other hand, as far as China is concerned, the government role has also been decreasing over the past years, but is still dominating the interactions. However, the overall trend suggests that in the future, the government role in China will continue to decrease until it loses its dominance.

Date of Award	May 2015
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Talal Rahwan (Supervisor)