Emmanuel Lazega

Sciences Po Paris | IEP · Centre de Sociologie des Organisations (CSO)

The issue of the influence of norms on behavior is as old as sociology itself. This paper explores the effect of normative homophily (i.e. “sharing the same normative choices”) on the evolution of the advice network among lay judges in a courthouse. (Blau, 1955) and (Blau, 1964) social exchange theory suggests that members select advisors based on...

Cooperation in an organization can be studied empirically by examining the routine transfers or exchanges among members of various kinds of resources. We argue that local regularities in the form of these transfers and exchanges shape the structure of cooperation. Using a case study of resource networks in a corporate law firm, we model the structu...

This article uses multilevel network analysis to identify an extended and latent opportunity structure for actors dually positioned in both intra-organizational and inter-organizational networks. This extended opportunity structure combines actors’ direct ties with indirect ties that they can add to their own network by ‘borrowing’ some of their bo...

This volume provides new insights into the functioning of organizational, managerial and market societies. Multilevel analysis and social network analysis are described and the authors show how they can be combined in developing the theory, methods and empirical applications of the social sciences. This book maps out the development of multilevel r...

Organizations performing non-routine, innovative, often knowledge- intensive tasks - for example professional partnerships - need a rather flat, collegial, and non - bureaucratic structure. This book examines cooperation among partners in a US corporate law firm and provides a grounded theory of collective action among rival peers, or collegiality....

One of the goals of open science is to promote the transparency and accessibility of research. Sharing data and materials used in network research is critical to these goals. In this paper, we present recommendations for whether, what, when, and where network data and materials should be shared. We recommend that network data and materials should b...

While realist approaches towards judicial decision-making have become predomi-nant, their appropriateness is much less obvious for specialized or technical fieldsof law, such as patent litigation, and evidence is much scarcer than for generalistcourts. Addressing this scarcity, the paper assesses judge-level variation in deci-sion outcomes based on...

This paper introduces the concept of “borderline institution” to characterize an institution in which actors push upstream the boundary between the normal and the pathological and find downstream ways of systematically taking advantage of this push ex‐post. This happens for example when actors make decisions based on predictions; and are simultaneo...

The Unified Patent Court (UPC) will be the pillar of a unified European patent enforcement system. Crucial to its success will be the harmonization of geographical variation in national jurisdictions. Germany offers a unique opportunity to explore such harmonization, as plaintiffs can choose between twelve regional courts to file a patent suit, res...

Learning, defined as the process of constructing meaning and developing competencies to act on it, is instrumental in helping individuals, communities, and organizations tackle challenges. When these challenges increase in complexity and require domain knowledge from diverse areas of expertise, it becomes difficult for single individuals to address...

La concurrence est aujourd’hui au premier plan des régulations étatiques nationales ou européennes. Mais elle fait de nouveau l’objet d’un vif débat, en France comme ailleurs : les politiques, les institutions et le droit qui la soutiennent doivent-ils avoir comme objectif exclusif le bien-être des consommatrices et consommateurs ? ou bien ont-ils...

Through Nan Lin's social resource theory, network studies have demonstrated the importance of personal contacts for status attainment. Achieving better occupations, wages, or social prestige depends not only on individual skills and personal resources, such as social class or human capital. Personal networks are also important structural factors be...

A multilevel network is defined as the junction of two interaction networks, one level representing the interactions between individuals and the other the interactions between organizations. The levels are linked by an affiliation relationship, each individual belonging to a unique organization. A new Stochastic Block Model is proposed as a unified...

A neo-structural approach to social phenomena can contribute to the current discussion of artificial intelligence (AI) and the social changes that it brings to society. Using the notion of appropriateness judgement, we examine the difference between online advice seeking from an AI and advice seeking among colleagues at the workplace, the latter de...

This chapter analyzes the transnational institutionalization of the European Unified Patent Court (created in 2013) as a case illustrating government by relationships and mo bilization of relational infrastructures in joint regulation of the economy. This court, spe cializing in patent litigation, originated from a public-private network of corpora...

This chapter analyzes the transnational institutionalization of the European Unified Patent Court (created in 2013) as a case illustrating government by relationships and mobilization of relational infrastructures in joint regulation of the economy. This court, specializing in patent litigation, originated from a public-private network of corporate...

L’observation de la construction politique de nouvelles institutions judiciaires transnationales permet d’éclairer un usage de la notion de culture juridique que l’on peut appeler dramaturgique. Cet article explore cet usage dans la négociation, par une oligarchie collégiale de juges et avocats d’affaires, harmonisateurs réunis en « conclave », d’u...

This published text underlying the keynote presentation at the Sunbelt XXXVIII in Utrecht, 2018. It presents a neo-structural approach to social processes in the organizational society and the usefulness of the analyses of multilevel networks to understand how we navigate these processes and are made aware of them when we face cooperation dilemmas....

Will contemporary societies be able to transform themselves in the coming transitions (socioeconomic, political, ecological, demographic)? This book argues that to answer this question we need to look at contemporary societies as organizational societies (Perrow, 1991). Organizations are important because policy, whether public or private, is desig...

This paper argues that the analysis of multilevel networks (AMN) is useful to understand politics, institutional entrepreneurship, and social change. AMN helps identify multilevel relational infrastructures (in particular multilevel social status) on which institutional entrepreneurship depends, especially in collegial oligarchies as laboratories f...

This paper argues that the analysis of multilevel networks (AMN) is useful to understand politics, institutional entrepreneurship, and social change. AMN helps identify multilevel relational infrastructures (in particular multilevel social status) on which institutional entrepreneurship depends, especially in collegial oligarchies as laboratories f...

This chapter introduces a neo-structural theoretical framework in sociology. It shows how social and organizational network analyses help explore the use of personalized relationships for management of cooperation dilemmas. Notions and measurements of relational infrastructures show how members navigate social processes (including solidarity, contr...

This picture, produced by Julien Brailly et al. (2016) and David Schoch (2020), visualizes multilevel networks of individuals and organizations.

When the Matrix trilogy was published in the mid-1980s, it introduced to mass culture a number of post-human tropes about the conscious machines that have haunted our collective imaginaries ever since. This volume explores the social representations and significance of technological developments – especially artificial intelligence and human enhanc...

This chapter explores how the military useS digitalization of the battlefield to try to reorganize and further routinize work and collective action by soldiers on the ground. Military fascination with animal swarms and their network analytical models leads to a representation of war as fight between self-organized (and to some extent unpredictable)...

A multilevel network is defined as the junction of two interaction networks, one level representing the interactions between individuals and the other the interactions between organizations. The levels are linked by an affiliation relationship, each individual belonging to a unique organization. A new Stochastic Block Model is proposed as a unifie...

Applying closed pattern mining to attributed two-mode networks requires two conditions. First, as in two-mode networks there are two kinds of vertices, each described with a proper attribute set, we have to consider patterns made of two components that we call bi-patterns. The occurrences of a bi-pattern forms an extension made of a pair of vertex...

O colóquio Recherche & Régulation 2015 mostrou que a Escola da Regulação, mais frequentemente reconhecida por suas teorias macroeconômicas, vem dando cada vez mais atenção à variedade de espaços nos quais se confrontam formas de regulação, principalmente ao nível meso do ponto de vista econômico e social. Esta contribuição esboça uma perspectiva ca...

This short presentation is a “go to” summary providing interested readers with indications of our development of this neo-structural economic sociology. The notion of a social discipline that is perceived as legitimate by members of a social milieu is an important notion for understanding the contemporary form of cooperation between competitors. Th...

This paper is the text prepared for the keynote address of the EUSN 2017 conference in Mainz, Germany. A short presentation of concepts reflects in part the foundations of neostructural sociology (NSS) and its use of social and organisational network analyses, combined with other methodologies, to better understand the roles of structure and cultur...

In two-mode networks there are two kinds of vertices, i.e objects, each being possibly described with a proper attribute set. This means that to select a subnetwork according to vertex descriptions we have to consider a pair of vertex subsets. A common technique is to extract from a network an essential subnetwork, the core subgraph of the network....

In society at large, top-down participation provided by institutional authorities, mainly in the form of dialogue and consultation, is often taken up (or even driven) by associations (for example, as part of “governance”among “stakeholders”). However, at the same time, it is often approached by the very same associations with defiance and mistrust....

We first define and experiment the hub-authority core (or HA-core) of a directed network. It depends on two a and h parameters expressing requirements on hub and authority degrees which have to be fulfilled within the core. The definition of these interrelated degrees is inspired by the standard definition of hub and authorities centrality scores (...

This chapter describes the way in which the intersection of networks can be a social and informal mechanism that contributes to organizational governance. Specifically, it is about a mechanism that helps organizations deal with potentially negative effects of status competition between members. We identify our main contribution as twofold. Firstly,...

Businesses of all kinds usually try as much as they can to participate in the regulation of their own markets. One way to participate in this regulatory activity is to exercise control on State institutions that solve conflicts among economic actors and discipline entrepreneurs. This paper describes a “consular” institution of joint regulation of m...

This chapter identifies collegiality as the organizational form underlying commons in all their manifestations, especially by using personalized relationships as tools for self-management among peers. It then examines an empirical example of articulation of collegiality with the default organizational form characterizing contemporary societies, i.e...

This paper presents a combined relational and cultural approach to transnational institution building by focusing on a network analysis of a small collegial oligarchy and normative alignments among its peers. To contribute to a theory of institutionalization, we propose hypotheses about whom professionals as institutional entrepreneurs are likely t...

The book series on Knowledge & Space explores the nature of human knowledge from a geographical perspective. How to create, share, and adopt new knowledge is a core question in the social sciences. Processes of learning and knowledge creation are the result of social practice and always take place in space and in specific geographical contexts. The...

This chapter offers a neostructural perspective on how organized mobility and relational turnover (OMRT) constitute important dimensions of the social context in which social mechanisms are deployed. They determine many of the characteristics of those mechanisms. As an illustration, White [HC. Chains of opportunity: system models of mobility in org...

This book discusses a core question in many fields of the social sciences, namely how to create, share and adopt new knowledge. It creates an original space for conversation between two lines of research that have developed largely in parallel for a long time: social network theory and the geography of knowledge. This book considers that relational...

This chapter identifies collegiality as the organizational form underlying commons in all their manifestations, especially by using personalized relationships as tools for self-management among peers. It then examines an empirical example of articulation of collegiality with the default organizational form characterizing contemporary societies, i.e...

Economic sociology has established the interdependencies between economic and social structures using the notion of embeddedness of the former in the latter. However research usually studies inter-organizational commercial networks and inter-individual informal networks separately. In this article we use a multilevel framework to analyze jointly ec...

In this chapter we study the influence of inter-organizational relationships on the formation of inter-individual relationships in the context of a trade fair. From a multilevel network analysis perspective (MNA), research often shows that inter-organizational ties have a strong influence on inter-individual relationship formation and vice-versa. T...

The chapter presents a blockmodeling analysis of multilevel (inter-individual and inter-organizational) networks. Several approaches are presented and used to blockmodel such networks. Each blockmodel represents a system of roles (White HC, Boorman SA, Breiger RL, Am J Sociol 81:730–780, 1976) and therefore a form of division of work that is likely...

This book identifies a plurality of levels of collective agency assumes that actors operate across as well as within these levels, and provides a bouquet of models for multilevel network datasets to account for vertical and horizontal interdependencies in social life. It shows how concepts applied to analyse single-level networks can be extended to...

Economic sociology has established the interdependencies between economic and social structures using the notion of embeddedness of the former in the latter. However research usually studies inter-organizational commercial networks and inter-individual informal networks separately. In this article we use a multilevel framework to jointly analyze ec...

This chapter provides a theoretical framework for the sociological study of the dynamics of multilevel networks. It looks at the organizational society as a class society in which the distribution of resources has to be specified at the meso level, where individual destinies depend, in part, on their capacities to use power through organizations as...

We explain how a type of multilevel model called a Multiple Membership Multiple Classification (MMMC) model can be used to investigate multilevel network dependencies for a nodal dependent variable at the lowest level of such a structure. In particular, the MMMC model allows us to estimate the relative share of variation in the dependent variable a...

This paper looks at the effect of identifying alters as direct competitors on their selection as advisors. We differentiate between two kinds of competition: cut-throat vs friendly. We argue that, unlike cut-throat competition, friendly competition makes collective learning possible as a social process: when knowledge is built in interactions that...

Le colloque Recherche & Régulation 2015 a montré que l’École de la régulation, le plus souvent attendue pour ses théories macro-économiques, accordait une attention croissante à la variété des espaces dans lesquels se jouent des formes de régulation, notamment au niveau méso-économique et méso-social. Cette contribution esquisse une perspective cap...

From a neo-structural perspective, the link between anormative regulation and morphogenesis (Archer MS. Anormative social regulation: an attempt to cope with social morphogenesis. In: Archer M (ed) Morphogenesis and the crisis of normativity. Springer, Dordrecht, 2016) has far-reaching implications. This chapter argues that this link sheds a strong...

Ce chapitre s’inscrit dans le cadre d’une théorie néo-structurale de la coopération entre concurrents pour étudier la manière dont l’organisation d’une place de marché, dans notre cas un salon, façonne la concurrence, autrement dit comment l’organisation de la rencontre entre vendeurs et acheteurs pèse sur les relations entre vendeurs. Nous montron...

The article presents a three-level network approach to the Matthew effect as a multilevel complement to Burt’s (2005) conception of the relationship between networks and performance. We first introduce a three-level dataset and the specificity of this data structure for explorations of cumulative advantage. Second, we present a population of scient...

The article presents a three-level network approach to the Matthew effect as a multilevel complement to Burt’s (2005) conception of the relationship between networks and performance. We first introduce a three-level dataset and the specificity of this data structure for explorations of cumulative advantage. Second, we present a population of scient...

In this chapter we study the influence of inter-organizational relationships on the formation of inter-individual relationships in the context of a trade fair. From a multilevel network analysis perspective (MNA), research often shows that inter-organizational ties have a strong influence on inter-individual relationship formation and vice-versa. T...

This book identifies a plurality of levels of collective agency in social life, assumes that actors operate across as well as within these levels, and provides a bouquet of models for multilevel network datasets to account for vertical and horizontal interdependencies in social life. It shows how concepts applied to analyse single-level networks ca...

L’institutionnalisme en sociologie souligne, dans une perspective souvent wébérienne, l’importance des valeurs, normes et règles comme frein au comportement économique prédateur et à l’exercice brutal du pouvoir. De ce point de vue, les valeurs sont constamment débattues, contestées, redéfinies et rehiérarchisées. Les collectifs organisés évoluent...

Economic sociology has established the interdependencies between economic and social structures using the notion of embeddedness of the former in the latter. However research usually studies inter-organizational commercial networks and inter-individual informal networks separately. In this article we use a multilevel framework to jointly analyze ec...

In this chapter we study the influence of inter-organizational relationships on the formation of inter-individual relationships in the context of a trade fair. From a multilevel network analysis perspective (MNA), research often shows that inter-organizational ties have a strong influence on inter-individual relationship formation and vice-versa. T...

La coordination est véritablement la question centrale des sciences sociales qu’il s’agisse de l’analyse économique, de la sociologie ou de la science politique. La théorie des jeux¸ que l’on peut définir rapidement comme une théorie de la décision en situation d’interaction, avait fait de la coordination un enjeu de recherche majeur. Après avoir é...

Mobility, relational turnover and synchronization costs Dynamics of multilevel relational infrastructures in collective action During the last two decades, neo-structural sociology has developed a theory of collective action based on observation and modeling of generic social processes (solidarities and exclusions, collective learning and socializ...

La coordination est véritablement la question centrale des sciences sociales qu’il s’agisse de l’analyse économique, de la sociologie ou de la science politique. La théorie des jeux¸ que l’on peut définir rapidement comme une théorie de la décision en situation d’interaction, avait fait de la coordination un enjeu de recherche majeur. Après avoir é...

Economic sociology has established the interdependencies between economic and social structures using the notion of embeddedness of the former in the latter. However research usually studies inter-organizational commercial networks and inter-individual informal networks separately. In this article we use a multilevel framework to analyze jointly ec...

Social selection models (SSMs) incorporate nodal attributes as explanatory covariates for modelling network ties (Robins et al., 2001). The underlying assumption is that the social processes represented by the graph configurations without attributes are not homogenous, and the network heterogeneity maybe captured by nodal level exogenous covariates...

Modeling relations between individuals is a classical question in social sciences and clustering individuals according to the observed patterns of interactions allows to uncover a latent structure in the data. Stochastic block model (SBM) is a popular approach for grouping the individuals with respect to their social comportment. When several relat...