Noshir Contractor - Northwestern University

Noshir Contractor - Northwestern University
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Noshir Contractor
Northwestern University
Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences
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Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the School of Engineering, School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA. He is the Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University. He is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in a wide variety of contexts including communities of practice in business, science and engineering communities, public health networks and virtual worlds. His research program has been funded continuously for over a decade by major grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation with additional funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Rockefeller Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation.
Professor Contractor has published or presented over 250 research papers dealing with communicating and organizing.  His book titled Theories of Communication Networks (co-authored with Professor Peter Monge and published by Oxford University) received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association.  He is the lead developer of CIKNOW (Cyberinfrastructure for Inquiring Knowledge Networks On the Web), a socio-technical system to enable networks among communities, as well as Blanche, a software environment to simulate the dynamics of social networks.
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Books by Noshir Contractor
Communities and Technologies 2007
by
Noshir Contractor
and
Charles Steinfield
Proceedings of the Third Communities and Technologies Conference
, 2007
The use of registered names , trademarks etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the abs...
more
The use of registered names , trademarks etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant laws and regulat ions and therefore free for general use. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made .
Modeling Multi-Year Customers' Considerations and Choices in China's Auto Market Using Two-Stage Bipartite Network Analysis
Choice modeling is important in transportation planning, marketing and engineering design, as it ...
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Choice modeling is important in transportation planning, marketing and engineering design, as it can quantify the influence of product attributes and customer demographics on customers' choice behaviors. Consumer studies suggest that customers' choice-making process often consists of two different stages: customers first consider subsets of available products on the market, and then make the final choice from the subsets. As existing preference modeling is mostly focused on the choice stage, there is a need to develop methods for understanding customer preferences at both stages, and investigate how customer preferences change from "consideration" to "choice", and whether such changes will be consistent over time. In this paper, we study customers' consideration and purchase behaviors in China's auto market using multi-year survey datasets. We demonstrate how descriptive network analysis and analytic network models (bipartite Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM)) capture the change of customers' preferences from the consideration stage to the choice stage in multiple consecutive years. Our results show that factors such as fuel consumption per unit power, car make origin, and place of production influence customers' considerations and final purchase decisions in different ways, and this difference between consideration and purchase is consistent over time. The main contribution of this study is that we validate the two-stage network-based modeling approach and its utility in preference elicitation using multiple-year dataset, which sheds lights on understanding the trend of customers' consideration and choice behaviors across years. Our study also contributes to a refined interpretation of the ERGM results with categorization of continuous variables into ranges, which shows that customer choice decisions may be more qualitatively influenced by product attributes rather than quantitatively. Our approach is generic and thus can be applied to solving broader choice modeling problems, such as the transportation mode selection and the adoption of clean technology (e.g., electric vehicles).
Using Trellis software to enhance high-quality large-scale network data collection in the field
THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS
The Intelligence Community (IC) is no stranger to the valuable contributions made by research in ...
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The Intelligence Community (IC) is no stranger to the valuable contributions made by research in the social and behavioral sciences (SBS) to the work of intelligence analysis. Likewise, researchers in many SBS disciplines have benefited from opportunities to work with the IC and conduct research on countless topics related to intelligence. But in an age when both technologies and national security concerns are evolving at lightning speed, the IC has recognized the critical need to more systematically take advantage of cutting-edge research from diverse SBS fields.
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The Intelligence Community lacks systematic integration of social and behavioral sciences research into analysis processes, limiting effectiveness.
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Springer Proceedings in Complexity
Predicting Real World Behaviors From Virtual Worlds Data
There is a growing body of literature that focuses on the similarities and differences between ho...
more
There is a growing body of literature that focuses on the similarities and differences between how people behave in the offline world vs. how they behave in these virtual environments. Data mining has aided in discovering interesting insights with respect to how people behave in these virtual environments. The book addresses prediction, mining and analysis of offline characteristics and behaviors from online data and vice versa. Each chapter will focus on a different aspect of virtual worlds to real world prediction e.g., demographics, personality, location, etc.
Full Text:
Theories of communication networks
To date, most network research contains one or more of five major problems. First, it tends to be...
more
To date, most network research contains one or more of five major problems. First, it tends to be atheoretical, ignoring the various social theories that contain network implications. Second, it explores single levels of analysis rather than the multiple levels out of which most networks are comprised. Third, network analysis has employed very little the insights from contemporary complex systems analysis and computer simulations.
Journal Articles by Noshir Contractor
Competing against former teammates predicts team victory
Sports Economics Review
, 2024
The small but growing body of research on team vs. team competition focuses on predicting the win...
more
The small but growing body of research on team vs. team competition focuses on predicting the winner based on multilevel factors, including the team's strength and prior relations among team members within a team. Our research demonstrates the significance and power of prior relations among members between competing teams in predicting the outcome of a contest. Leveraging data over 8 seasons of the Indian Premier League (IPL), we demonstrate the effects of competing against former teammates on a team's victory in IPL matches. If two teams, A and B, are competing in a match, and nA players from A are former teammates of players on B and nB players from B are former teammates of players on A, then if team A has smaller values of nA, it will have a competitive advantage over Team B with a higher value of nB. We call the magnitude of the difference of nA and nB the “ecosystem” factor in predicting performance. Using regression and stochastic network models, we find that the ecosystem factor significantly impacts the outcome of a match. Our findings have implications for franchise owners. While recruiting a player, franchise owners should not rely solely on the player's ability but also leverage the rivalry between former teammates.
Product Design Incorporating Competition Relations: A Network-Based Design Framework Considering Local Dependencies
by
Noshir Contractor
and
Wei Chen
ASME Journal of Mechanical Design
, 2024
System design has been facing the challenges of incorporating complex dependencies between indivi...
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System design has been facing the challenges of incorporating complex dependencies between individual entities into design formulations. For example, while the decision based design framework successfully integrated customer preference modeling into optimal design, the problem was formulated from a single entity's perspective, and the competition between multiple enterprises was not considered in the formulation. Network science has offered several solutions for studying interdependencies in various system contexts. However, efforts have primarily focused on analysis (i.e., the forward problem). The inverse problem still remains: How can we achieve the desired system-level performance by promoting the formation of targeted relations among local entities? In this study, we answer this question by developing a network-based design framework. This framework uses network representations to characterize and capture dependencies and relations between individual entities in complex systems and integrate these representations into design formulations to find optimal decisions for the desired performance of a system. To demonstrate its utility, we applied this framework to the design for market systems with a case study on vacuum cleaners. The objective is to increase the sales of a vacuum cleaner or its market share by optimizing its design attributes, such as suction power and weight, with the consideration of market competition relations, such as inter-brand triadic competition involving three products from different brands. We solve this problem by integrating an exponential random graph model (ERGM) with a genetic algorithm. The results indicate that the new designs, which consider market competition, can effectively increase the purchase frequency of specific vacuum cleaner models and the proposed network-based design method outperforms traditional design optimization.
Survey data on customer two-stage decision-making process in household vacuum cleaner market
Data in Brief
, 2024
This paper presents the data collection method and introduces the dataset about consumers’ consid...
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This paper presents the data collection method and introduces the dataset about consumers’ consider-then-choose behaviors in the household vacuum cleaner market. First, we designed a questionnaire that collected participants’ consideration and choice data, social network data, demographic information, and preferences for product features. In addition, we obtained data on vacuum cleaner product features
through web scraping from online shopping websites. After data cleaning and processing, the resulting dataset enables investigation into customer preferences in two stages, namely the consideration and choice stages and the impact of social influence on the two-stage decision-making process. This dataset is unique as it is the first of its kind to
collect both customers’ revealed preferences in a two-stage decision-making process and their ego social networks. This enables the modeling of customer preferences while accounting for social influence. The published survey questionnaire can be used as a template to collect data on other products in support of customer preferences modeling and the design for market systems.
Communicate or not: Exploring the different effects of instrumental and expressive networks on thriving at work
Journal of Management & Organization
, 2024
Thriving at work is closely related to the way employees are embedded in their social contexts, s...
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Thriving at work is closely related to the way employees are embedded in their social contexts, such as the structure of their communication relations with coworkers. In previous research, communication relations have been found to negatively relate to thriving at work. However, social network theory suggests that communication relations are beneficial in obtaining resources in the workplace, which might increase thriving at work. To reconcile the seemingly conflicting mechanisms, we draw on social network theory to unpack the mechanisms underlying communication relations by considering the instrumental and expressive roles. Using a structural equation model, we investigate the indirect effects of communication networks on thriving at work via advice-seeking networks (instrumental) and friendship networks (expressive). Our findings indicate communication relations are negatively related to thriving at work via advice-seeking relations, but are positively related to thriving at work via friendship relations.
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Structural equation modeling confirmed significant connections between communication centrality, advice-seeking centrality, and thriving outcomes.
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Think like a team: Shared mental models predict creativity and problem-solving in space analogs
Acta Astronautica
, 2024
As long-distance space exploration missions move beyond low Earth orbit, and crews become more Ea...
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As long-distance space exploration missions move beyond low Earth orbit, and crews become more Earth independent, it is essential to identify predictors of team performance-properties of teams that can be monitored during space flight to anticipate performance decrements. The most robust team state predicting performance in the team effectiveness literature is shared mental models. Shared mental models are properties of a group reflecting how members organize knowledge and understanding about the purpose of the team, the nature of the work, and how members work together. In this study we developed a measure of shared mental models for use in ground-based analogs. It was administered in the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA)'s Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) Campaign 4, Campaign 5, and the Nazemnyy Eksperimental'nyy Kompleks (NEK) SIRIUS-19 mission. HERA included eight 4-member crews in isolation for 45 days; NEK SIRIUS-19 included a 6-member crew in isolation for 120 days. To track performance variations, we administered two team tasks: a creative thinking task and a problem-solving task. We found substantial positive correlations between shared mental models and both dimensions of team performance in HERA and in NEK. Though shared mental models are a strong predictor of team performance across mission stages, we found some nuanced shifts. First, mental model sharedness in HERA is associated with crews generating fewer ideas in the third quarter than in other quarters, but also generating more novel, original ideas. Second, in the NEK mission we observed a third quarter effect with problem-solving, and the nature of the effect was that the effect of the shared mental model was most important in all quarters except the third. These results suggest that mission timing but also mission duration are important factors that condition relations between team process variables like shared mental models and team performance indicators.
Boundary Transitions in Dynamic Teamwork
Academy of Management Review
, 2024
We develop a theoretically grounded framework of boundary transitions and their effect on individ...
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We develop a theoretically grounded framework of boundary transitions and their effect on individuals working in dynamic teamwork settings. "Boundaries in teamwork," described here as the psychological limits that define one team as separate from another, have been examined in silos across a broad range of literatures. Consequently, we know little about the cognitive processes associated with the psychological shift in focus (or boundary transition) that occurs because of a change in people, roles, tasks, or technologies in the context of dynamic teamwork. Our comprehensive model of boundary transitions incorporates a broader perspective of boundary transitions, such as transitions across multiple types of boundaries, as well as dimensions of boundary transitions, such as the strength and meaning of the boundaries traversed, the number of boundaries crossed (transition breadth), and whether the context of the transition is within or between teams (transition context). We leverage this framework to explore the cognitive implications of boundary transitions (cognitive exertion and expansion) as well as their implications for individual contributions to teamwork and provide an agenda for future inquiry in boundary transitions in dynamic collaborative teamwork.
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Introduces a holistic framework showing how boundary transitions affect mental capacity and contributions in dynamic teamwork.
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The Leadership Signatures of Effective Multiteam Systems
Academy of Management
, 2023
Multiteam systems (MTSs), systems of interdependent teams, tackle complex organizational problems...
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Multiteam systems (MTSs), systems of interdependent teams, tackle complex organizational problems requiring input from multiple teams. The complexity of MTSs, originating from boundary issues to the disruptive effects of a large system, require effective leadership systems. Many MTSs lack formal leadership structures and rely on shared and coordinated leadership from individuals embedded in different teams. This study examines the social organization of leadership and its effects on individual and team performance. Leadership networks were investigated during a laboratory experiment conducted in a NASA space analog involving 120 individuals working in twenty-five 4-component team MTSs. Leadership networks were assessed after a 60-minute simulation, and performance indicators were derived based on a collective MTS decision and individual, team, and MTS outcomes. ALAAMs (Auto-Logistic Actor Attribute Models) were used to understand how leadership organizing signatures affect performance. Findings indicate that popularity and transitive leadership structures positively predicted individual performance. Followership activity and engaging in transitive structures negatively affected team performance. This study provides four contributions: 1) theorizing structural signatures characterizing collective leadership, 2) mapping those signatures onto performance, 3) expanding the conceptualization of MTS performance to incorporate interdependence, and 4) applying advances in network analysis to understand the effects of leadership organization.
Introduction to the special issue on scientific networks
Network Science
, 2023
Scholars have explored the science of science from a networks perspective from the early days of ...
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Scholars have explored the science of science from a networks perspective from the early days of the study of social networks. Price (1965) pioneered the methodology and theoretical import of citation networks. Crane (1969) examined the social structure among scientists to test the invisible college hypothesis wherein groups of researchers working in a common area shared informal ties with one another. Indeed, science has been described as "a complex, self-organizing, and evolving network of scholars, projects, papers, and ideas" (Fortunato et al., 2018, p. 1). Hence, it is not surprising that scientific networks play a significant role within the larger domain of network science, focusing on the relational nature of scientific endeavors. And by doing so they have contributed to advances in network science while also contributing to the emergent debates about the transformation of science. Recent trends in analysis of science transformation are focused on a rising demand for interdisciplinary collaboration, knowledge application, decreasing the gap between knowledge production and transfer to practice, and increasing interaction between science and other societal actors and spheres (industry and government). Research on scientific networks, with its relational nature, helps us to understand and enable these modern trends of science transformation across disciplines. It enables us to analyze the multidimensional networks encompassing scientists, scientific organizations, funding entities, publication outlets, and projects; to discover the reasons for their collaboration, integration, importance; and to measure their prestige, popularity, success, and social impact. In short, how and why collaborations form-and how they perform.
Success in First-Time Partnerships: Optimal Expertise Diversity
Academy of Management
, 2023
Collaboration is of fundamental importance to modern scientific and technological development, an...
more
Collaboration is of fundamental importance to modern scientific and technological development, and expertise diversity has emerged as an important factor in predicting the success of collaboration. While expertise diversity has typically been seen as the knowledge attribute of a group (i.e., between collaborators), we provide an additional theoretical and empirical conceptualization that considers whether collaborators’ knowledge itself is similar (versus being dissimilar) to the knowledge domain of their research output. We define the degree of (dis)similarity between collaborators’ knowledge and project output as divergent ideation. We examine the effect of expertise diversity and divergent ideation (and their interaction) on the success of first-time collaborations using data from 158,012 first-time partnerships recorded in the US Patent Office between the years of 1976 and 2012. We use natural language processing to estimate areas of expertise of each inventor and develop measures of expertise diversity and divergent ideation. Results show that collaborations exhibiting a high degree of expertise diversity produce more impactful products, while collaborations exhibiting a low degree of expertise diversity are more likely to collaborate again. Further, collaborations exhibiting a high degree of expertise diversity and a low-to-moderate degree of divergent ideation are most likely to create highest impact inventions, but they are less likely to sustain their collaboration. We conclude our study by outlining the implications of our findings to the literatures on diversity and technological innovation.
Information sharing in a hybrid workplace: understanding the role of ease-of-use perceptions of communication technologies in advice-seeking relationship maintenance
by
Jasmine Wu
and
Noshir Contractor
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
, 2023
Shifts to hybrid work prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic have the potential to substantially impac...
more
Shifts to hybrid work prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic have the potential to substantially impact social relationships at work. Hybrid employees rely heavily on digital collaboration technologies to communicate and share information. Therefore, employees' perceptions of the technologies are critical in shaping organizational networks. However, the dyadic-level misalignment in these perceptions may lead to relationship dissolution. To explore the social network consequences of hybrid work, we conducted a two-wave survey in a department of an industrial manufacturing firm (N ¼ 169). Our results show that advice seekers were less likely to maintain their advice-seeking ties when they had a mismatch in ease-of-use perceptions of technology with their advisors. The effect was more substantial when advice seekers spent more time working remotely. The study provides empirical insights into how congruence in employees' perceptions of organizational communication technologies affects how they maintain advice networks during hybrid work.
Misalignment in Technology Perceptions Predicts Advice Tie Dissolution
Academy of Management
, 2023
Shifts to hybrid work prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic have the potential to substantially impac...
more
Shifts to hybrid work prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic have the potential to substantially impact social relationships at work. Hybrid employees rely heavily on digital collaboration technologies to communicate and share task-related information. Therefore, employees’ perceptions of the technologies are critical in shaping networks within organizations. The dyadic-level misalignment in these perceptions, however, may lead to relationship dissolution. To explore the social network consequences of hybrid work, we conducted a two-wave survey in a department of an industrial manufacturing firm (N = 169). Our results show that employees were less likely to maintain their advice-seeking ties when they had a mismatch in the ease-of-use perception of technology with their colleagues. The effect was stronger when advice-seekers tended to work remotely. The study provides empirical insights into how congruence in employees' perceptions of organizational communication technologies affects the way they churn advice networks during hybrid work.
Revisiting the effects of social networks on enterprise collaboration technology use: A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis approach
by
Mengxiao Zhu
and
Noshir Contractor
Decision Support Systems
, 2023
Enterprise collaboration technologies (ECTs) are increasingly recognized for supporting effective...
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Enterprise collaboration technologies (ECTs) are increasingly recognized for supporting effective and efficient digital collaboration, such as decision-making activities, among employees. Given the social and collaborative nature of ECT use, social network theory offers important and helpful insights into how and why employees' social network relations facilitate their ECT use. However, existing research primarily examines the effects of a single social network relation or several social network relations separately, without applying a holistic approach to investigate the joint effect of multiple social network relations on ECT use. Drawing on a novel technique of fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and social network analysis, this study explores how multiple social network relations (i.e., advice, friendship, and communication) collectively influence ECT use. Using multi-source data from 178 employees in the human resources department of a global technology company, we identify several configurations of multiple social network relations associated with high ECT use and low ECT use. Our findings indicate that a single social network relation is insufficient to explain ECT use and should be considered alongside other social network relations. Overall, this study provides an integrative framework to unpack the complex and contingent effects of multiple social network relations on ECT use.
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Novel application of fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) reveals holistic effects of multiple social networks on ECT use outcomes.
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Teams in the Digital Workplace: Technology's Role for Communication, Collaboration, and Performance
Harvard Business School
, 2023
This paper addresses the need for theoretical advancements in understanding team processes and th...
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This paper addresses the need for theoretical advancements in understanding team processes and the impact of technology on teams. Specifically, it examines the use of digital collaboration technologies by organizational teams and their effect on team communication and collaboration. Using the concept of affordances as a theoretical lens, the paper explores the potential relationships between technology affordances and essential team processes. It also provides an agenda for future research on social technologies and teams as well as novel methodological approaches for better understanding the ways in which digital technologies are affecting team processes and performance in the workplace
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