Organizational commitment helps explain why employees stay with their organization in spite of alternative opportunities, why employees exhibit organizational citizenship behavior, and why some organizations are more adaptive than others.  Many of the antecedents that help explain the development of organizational commitment in employees invoke social relations.  By examining ego networks, this paper studies how the commitment attitudes of ego's direct ties (and their direct ties) influences ego's commitment to the organization.  This paper also examines two potential moderators of the alter commitment - ego commitment relationship:  variance in the level of commitment between alters and the density of ego's network.

Application of Social Network Analysis in Open Source Software Community

Open Source Software (OSS) development is often characterized as a fundamentally new way to develop software. Due to the collaborative structure of most OSS software, a network of projects and developers is formed in OSS community by self-organizing. This project is aimed to investigate the knowledge exchange among projects throughout this collaborative network and its impact on project success. Two roles of community members, project manager and core-developer, will be examined in this project and is expected to yield different results. The centrality of each member in every project will be calculated. The total rank of downloads and activity percentile (recent traffic, development, and communication) are used to measure long-term popularity of the projects. Project size is employed as control variable. The dataset for this project comes from SourceForge.net, the world's largest Open Source software development web site, which uses relational databases to store project management activity and statistics.

For further research, I will look into the evolvement of OSS projects by longitude analysis, since Data dumps for SourceForge.net are archived every month. It would be interesting to investigate how new collaboration ties are formed voluntarily, whether by ways of FoF or complementary skills or other forms. Because of time limit, I would only finish the first part of this study for my term project.

POLICY NETWORKS IN TRADE PROTECTIONISM: GOVERNMENT-BUSINESS RELATIONSHIPS IN BRAZIL AND MERCOSUL 

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of community readiness for change on interorganizational relationships among smoke-free coalitions in rural Kentucky commuities and the public and private agencies that provide coalition members with resources and support in local policy development. Data were drawn from a community readiness survey and a network survey of 148 community leaders representing 30 Kentucky counties at baseline; 160 at 12 months follow-up; and 160 at 24 months follow-up. Participant responses were collapsed for each community (N=30). Multiple regression quadratic assignment procedure (MRQAP) was used to test the effect of community readiness and other key variables on interorganizational network characteristics. Results indicated that similarity in community readiness level was associated with similarity in network ties between community coalitions and the organizational partners they contacted for resources and support. Additional findings are discussed. These research findings have theoretical and applied implications for enhancing tobacco control program capacity and organizing effective public health network systems.

It is no surprise that when you put 14 college men together in a room to discuss important issues, some people are much more influential than others. This study focuses on the executive board of the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity at the University of Kentucky. It is critical for the executive board to effectively work together between members as well as across hierarchal levels to plan strategically and operate efficiently. This research identifies those influential individuals along with mapping out multiple relationships.

Effects of Self-Monitoring on Friendship Building and Maintenance