Sociological investigations of economic exchange pay particular attention to the manner in which institutions and social structures shape transactions among economic actors. Extending this line of inquiry, we explore how interfirm networks in the US venture capital (VC) market from 1986 to 1998...

Social relationships channel information, influence, and access to scarce resources. As a consequence, social networks - the patterns of these relationships across the members of a community - influence who comes up with important innovations, whether and how rapidly those innovations get...

In innovative industries, private-sector companies increasingly are participants in open communities of science and technology. To participate in the system of exchange in such communities, firms often publicly disclose what would otherwise remain private discoveries. In a quantitative case...

We analyze longitudinal data on academic careers and conduct interviews with faculty members to determine the scope and causes of the gender gap in patenting among life scientists over a 30-year period show that women faculty members patent at about 40 percent of the rate of men. We find that...

This is a descriptive study of the structure of communications in a modern organization. We analyze a dataset with millions of electronic mail messages, calendar meetings and teleconferences for many thousands of employees of a single, multidivisional firm during a three-month period in calendar...