coordinator: Rafael Wittek

The research line "Work and Organizations" centers around the issue of organizational control and governance: How do modern organizations control ("govern") their workforce? How can variations, changes and outcomes of organizational governance structures be explained? How do different forms of control affect organizational level outcomes like performance, and employee level outcomes like well-being, social embeddedness and pro- and antisocial behavior at the workplace? How do social networks and their dynamics affect these processes?

These questions are addressed in three interrelated research areas. The first research area focuses on the antecedents and consequences of intra-organizational social network dynamics. Formal and informal social networks - like interpersonal trust, communication or advice relations - play an important role for the functioning of organizations as well as for outcomes at the level of individuals, like their well-being, performance, conflict management strategies, or pro-social behavior. At the same, the content and structure of formal and networks like hierarchies and status differences are influenced by individual level attributes and organizational characteristics. Intra-organizational longitudinal social network data is collected in several organizations to address these issues.

The second research area tackles professionalization and performance of Humanitarian Aid Organizations. This research area consists of several projects coordinated by Liesbet Heyse. Fist, using a sample of evaluation reports of humanitarian aid projects, organizational antecedents of project performance are investigated by systematically content analyzing and coding the reports. Second, a large humanitarian organization provided access to its personnel files and archives in order to investigate the professionalization of its human resource management policies. A database on rule changes is built to model changes in organizational policies. The personnel files are used to model career paths and performance of humanitarian aid workers.

The third research area addresses the causes, processes and consequences of reorganizations in public and private organizations in the Netherlands. It grew out of an NWO innovation scheme (‘vernieuwingsimpuls') subsidy, which allowed to build a two-wave panel dataset of a representative sample of 1600 Dutch organizations, as well as qualitative in-depth data on the processes of organizational change in seven organizations. This data allows to study, among others, questions related to the impact of globalization on the incidence and types of organizational changes in Dutch organizations, differences in governance structures and change patterns between public and private organizations, conditions for success or failure of change, or issues related to the occurrence of problems in the implementation of organizational change projects.

The research line is coordinated by Rafael Wittek. Planned activities for the coming year are a workshop in the context of the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences (QMSS) program of the European Science Foundation, titled "Networks, Markets and Organizations" (organized by R. Wittek and B. Völker), and a panel on at the World Conference of the International Sociological Association (ISA) in Gothenburg (2010). In addition, study days on "Interdisciplinary perspectives on Organizations" will be organized, in collaboration with senior scholars from other Universities within or outside the Netherlands.