Our premise is that organizations are real, evolved, human entities. In our professional life we have studied myriad networks of people working together for a common purpose, from sprawling movements to tiny teams of two. However, these people networks, including organizations, are not “made of” people. People as people are independent of the organizations they are part of.
Networks are known by their nodes. Organization networks connect positions into groups into organizations. People “step into” positions, making them concrete, and also giving them a place, quite literally a physical location. All five node types are implied in a representation that looks like a bulked-up org chart. As we will see, however, we cannot define an organization node without including a companion link that puts every node in a larger context
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While nodes (and its parent link) identify the network and its members, that one link is just the first, necessary, relationship needed to adequately represent an organization.
It is not sufficient.
The problem is there are so many types of links besides the main parent link. What relationships should we map? And why, what’s the use of each link type?
We have developed a link framework that allows for separate link types to be specified between organization nodes. Two types of organization links, reporting (A) and process (B) relationships, are defined to be strong but few in number. Two types, group (C) and information (D) relationships, are influential and potentially many in number. The fifth type, personal (E), maps social ties. These links can be used to create networks of separate types, of type combinations, or of all types
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