Malcolm Alexander

Griffith University · Arts, Education and Law Group

A presentation on factors creating inequalities for women engineers attaining interesting, challenging work in a project-based organisation. Employs ethnographic and Social and Organisational Network Analysis and methods as well as Joan Acker's (2006) Inequalitiy Regimes Theory.

Major findings relate to differences in the structures of women’s and men’s informal relations, identifying 20 themes of interesting, challenging work for engineers, and establishing that this work is attained through team work in projects. This study develops a model identifying eight factors necessary for attaining opportunities for interesting,...

This paper reports an investigation of social network choices made by professional women engineers working in a predominantly male (70%) workplace. It was a mixed methods study involving a web-based social network survey across the whole organization (ONA Survey), participant-observation of a section of the organization and interviews with people i...

This presentation reports an investigation of social network choices made by professional women engineers working in a predominantly male (70%) workplace. It was a mixed methods study involving a web-based social network survey across the whole organisation (ONA Survey), participant-observation of a section of the organisation and interviews with p...

A report on the methodology developed to research networks through a gendered lens and uncover the impacts of these networks, without relying on anecdotal and self-reported information for the PhD thesis: Who you know? Women engineers and informal networking in a project-based organisation in Australia.The methodology developed for this research is...

Social and organizational network analysts (S/ONA) map friendship networks with sociometric surveys. In a smallish social setting (an office, a classroom or the like) respondents indicate who they consider a friend. Network diagrams assemble this directed data to produce a picture of the whole network which shows the strategic locations of individu...

Social and organizational network analysts (S/ONA) map friendship networks with sociometric surveys. In a smallish social setting (an office, a classroom or the like) respondents indicate who they consider a friend. Network diagrams assemble this directed data to produce a picture of the whole network which shows the strategic locations of individu...

Economic sociology investigates the detail of economic, inter-organizational and social networks in business and industry. It explores embedded patterns of activity and interaction across the economy and the impact on people and societies. Inter-organizational networks involve operational partnerships mixed with relations of finance, investment, an...

Social Network Analysis (SNA) in applied, practical settings has made significant advances in the last decade. This paper reviews the new research designs they utilise and their practical research applications. The paper begins with the best known, sociometric ‘whole network’ WN-SNA research tradition used in organizational and educational research...

This paper examines the network of personal contacts, created by interlocking directorates, among all board members of the Top 500 publicly listed Australian companies. In the past it has been difficulty to analyse such sparse networks, however recent advances in our understanding of the 'small world' phenomenon and the application of ran...

In 1997 Emirbayer published a manifesto for relational sociology and social network analysis (SNA) figured prominently as a methodology for this program. This paper supports the program of relational sociology proposed in this manifesto but argues that Emirbayer undervalued social research traditions in SNA that examine networks from a bottom-up pe...

Social capital is accessed through social networks. This paper proposes a method for studying the links between social capital and personal networks at the individual level. We describe a social capital resource (SCR) name generator method that utilizes the substantive domains of social capital resources as the basis of a multiple question name gen...

Recent interest in the measurement of social capital has generated new suggestions for using survey data to measure basic indicators of social network formation. This paper considers the (2-mode) social networks created by people's involvement in associations. Information on respondents' participation in associations is collected often as an indica...

This paper surveys the range of techniques available for the analysis of 2-mode (actor-by-event) datasets and proposes an additional option for visualization and analysis that uses the line-graph of the bipartite adjacency matrix. The nodes of this line-graph are roles or statuses conferred on actors through their participation in events or recogni...

Theories of social exclusion focus on the shortcomings and barriers that prevent members of disadvantaged groups improving their life circumstances. Their failure to do so perpetuates social inequalities though generations and through time. Greater utilisation of social capital and community capacity building among these groups are seen as avenues...

Physicists have suddenly found social networks. Triggered by the modelling of 'small world architecture' presented by Watts and Strogatz in Nature (June, 1998), physicists, computer scientists, and mathematicians have produce a flood of materials on social, ecological, biological and biochemical networks. They have generated working models of netwo...

The fans of the science fiction franchise, Star Trek, are known as 'Trekkies' and are the only fan subculture to have an entry in the OED. This paper reports on a study of 'ordinary' Star Trek fans. The methodology uses in-depth interviews coupled with a study of respondents' egonets (their circle of close contacts). We discuss issues associated wi...

We describe a methodology to examine bipartite relational data structures as exemplified in networks of corporate interlocking. These structures can be represented as bipartite graphs of directors and companies, but direct comparison of empirical datasets is often problematic because graphs have different numbers of nodes and different densities. W...

We describe a methodology to examine bipartite relational data structures as exemplified in networks of corporate interlocking. These structures can be represented as bipartite graphs of directors and companies, but direct comparison of empirical datasets is often problematic because graphs have different numbers of nodes and different densities. W...

This paper advances the resource dependence and social networks literature by investigating a board’s structural social capital created as a consequence of interlocking directorates. Using approaches and measures developed by social network analysis we compare the interpersonal directorship networks of the top 250 companies in the United States and...

This paper advances the resource dependence and social networks literature by investigating a board's structural social capital created as a consequence of interlocking directorates. Using approaches and measures developed by social network analysis we compare the interpersonal directorship networks of the top 250 companies in the United States and...

This article examines the (interpersonal) network of boardroom contacts among the directors of Australia's largest companies in 1976 and 1996. Interlocking directors create an intercorporate network but also an interpersonal, contact network. The network reaches all directors serving on any board that has a connected interlocker/networker on it. Th...

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This paper examines the top 250 corporations and associated networks of interlocking directorates in Canada and Australia in the 1990s. Interlocks are interpreted both as social relations of class hegemony and as vehicles in the accumulation of capital along an integrated financial-industrial axis (finance capital). In Canada both these sides of co...

This paper studies the largest 250 companies in Australia in the early 1990s and their network of interlocking directorates. It examines the institutional profile of Australian big business and the impact of globalisation. It finds that international capital has not, as yet, made major inroads into the core of Australian big business although globa...

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This paper presents results from a comparative study of company directors of the top 250 Australian companies. The paper analyses the concentration of directorship holding in Australia and New Zealand in 1991 and compares this with other Australian, New Zealand, British, Canadian and American studies. The paper argues that while the density of inte...

This paper explores the role of a local capitalist class in the process of regional development as portrayed in three models: a political economy model; a growth machine model; and a model of complementary dependence. It looks at the suitability of these models as applied to Queensland and then outlines a research project intended to validate or re...

The 'new science' of complexity and chaos theory has grown rapidly in the last three decades aided enormously by the quantum expansion of computers and computing applications. Responding to the energy and enthusiasm of complexity scientists and publicists, social theorists have assimilated concepts of complexity and its potential impacts on sociolo...

Two powerful ideas lie at the heart of democratic, liberal capitalism. One is economic justice – the idea that private business activity should be consistent with the public interest and facilitate the full development of the lives of citizens. The second idea is the belief that competitive markets are the best social mechanism to achieve economic...

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A sociology of business needs to work with sufficient detail to capture the actual (lived) differentiations within the world of business but state its findings at sufficient level of generality to have theoretical interest. Bob Connell's Ruling Class, Ruling Culture (RCRC) was a model of such an exercise. This paper takes RCRC as an initial exposit...

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Social network analysis (SNA) has much to offer sociology. However, there is little consideration of SNA in contemporary sociological theory (CST) although SNA developed in parallel with the consolidation of CST in the 1960s and 1970s. SNA championed its distinctiveness as 'structural analysis'. Nearly all current CST presents 'structure versus age...

Written for the Dept. of Sociology. Typewritten MS. Thesis (Ph.D.)--McGill University. Bibliogr.: leaves 327-339.