How’s the traffic on your faculty listserve these days? Quiet? Active? The answer, along with other
information about inter-faculty email traffic, may hold the key to predicting both
your school’s social health and impending crises. Consider, for example, how the logs of DePaul and Villanova
may have looked in recent months.
“EMAIL logs can provide advance warning of an organisation
reaching crisis point. That's the tantalising suggestion to emerge from the
pattern of messages exchanged by Enron employees,” says this
article in New Scientist.
In a new paper, Identification
of Organizational Tension Using Complex Networks, presented at the International Workshop on
Complex Networks in May, Ben Collingsworth and Ronaldo Menezes analyze records
(but not the content) of 517,000 emails sent by 150 Enron senior staff to
around 15,000 employees during the company's final 18 months. They found that:
the number of active email cliques,
defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every
other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December
2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups
and not shared with other employees.
Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may
have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a
company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with,
and stop sharing information more widely. (emphasis mine)
From the abstract of
what appears to be the referenced paper, but with a slightly altered title:
When an organization is in trouble, we
observe social tension among its employees. That being the case, one should be
able to discern this tension by examining properties of a social network of the
employees-the network should reflect the employees’ mood; the fears, worries,
gossips that are circulating, the good and the bad, are all reflected in
organization’s social network. One of the best representations of the true
social organizational social network can be constructed from email exchange.
The issue we investigate in this paper relates to timing: when does the network
exhibit social tension when it is known to be present in the organization? In
this paper, we provide a temporal analysis of the email social network
constructed for the Enron Corporation and show that changes in network
characteristics strongly correlate to real-world events in that organization.
More importantly, we show that this correlation is time-shifted and appears in
the network before the event becomes common knowledge; our hypothesis is that
we can use the anomalies in the network to identify social tension in the
organization and consequently help mitigate its consequences.
New Scientist concludes, however, that replicating the
study’s findings may be difficult.
Because of privacy concerns, e-mail logs are rarely made available to researchers.