Abstract
This chapter provides a theoretical framework for the sociological study of the dynamics of multilevel networks. It looks at the organizational society as a class society in which the distribution of resources has to be specified at the meso level, where individual destinies depend, in part, on their capacities to use power through organizations as “tools with a life of their own” (Selznick P, TVA and the grass roots: A study of politics and organization, University of California Press, 1949). Multilevel structures are defined as different but interdependent superposed levels of organized collective agency evolving each at their own rhythms and raising issues of costs of synchronization between the temporalities of these different levels. The notion of cost of synchronization is proposed to account for the efforts spent by actors at each level to structure the other level so as to reshape their constraints and opportunities and thus redefine the terms of this synchronization of temporalities. The main cost of interest with respect to these efforts is defined in terms of creation or maintenance of relational infrastructures, i.e. social forms in a Simmelian sense, such as social status and social niches, at an intermediary level providing leverage for actors involved in such ‘cross-level’ structuration. Organized mobility and relational turnover, as created by multilevel structures and the synchronization of their different temporalities, are construed as context for social processes helping members manage dilemmas of collective action that characterize the organizational society. Empirical examples are provided following the ‘multilevel spinning top model’ of synchronization as well as implications for the study of the emergence of corporate entities, institutions, and social inequalities.
Support for this project is provided by the Dynamique des réseaux multiniveaux (DYREM) project, funded by Sorbonne Paris-Cité. I thank Tom Snijders for help and advice, as well as Avner Bar-Hen, Julien Brailly, Ulrik Brandes, David Chavalarias, Patrice Duran, Guillaume Favre, Johannes Glückler, Lise Mounier, Marie Jourda, Martin Mader and Christophe Prieur for stimulating discussions related to this project. I am grateful to Daniel Courgeau who initiated the publication of this volume after reading the paper by Brailly and Lazega (2012).
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Notes
- 1.
The term ‘organizational society’ has several dimensions. As Perrow (1991) puts it, it means that large-scale public or private organizations “absorb” societal functions that were/could be fulfilled by communities. It also means that a system of interdependent organizations, that are interlinked at the meso-level in a multi-level network, shapes the opportunity structure of citizens by coordinating various forms of “opportunity hoarding” (Tilly 1998). Finally it is also a metaphor to express that all individuals today play at both – individual and organizational – levels simultaneously and that domination in the Weberian sense is linked to the control of organizations as “tools with a life of their own”.
- 2.
Each level in multilevel systems of collective agency has its own temporalities: rhythms of self-maintenance and rhythms of actions. In fact one could argue that a level of collective agency exists because it has its own temporality. I thank David Chavalarias for this insight.
- 3.
- 4.
The term “place” is used here in a general sense to refer to a location that can be occupied by a single person in any formally organized circuit that can be geographical and/or organizational. It is to be distinguished from the term “position” (White et al. 1977), i.e. a set of structurally equivalent actors that we call a social niche (Lazega 2001) when the ties between actors in the position are dense. A position makes sense in a system of positions (or niches when the positions are dense) that differs from the system of places while always combined and coevolving with it (Lazega forthcoming). Space (contiguity) and network (connectivity), for example, are both different and related.
- 5.
Snijders’ work in many ways inaugurates a new epistemology in the social sciences, whereby research measures, formalizes, and models the co-evolution between behaviour and interdependencies, between interdependencies and conflicts between actors, individual and collective, an approach in which one confronts models with reality and its measurements, i.e. where models, measurements and problematics truly co-evolve.
- 6.
- 7.
For a review of the literature on advice seeking as social exchange, see Lazega (2014a).
- 8.
We define these terms metaphorically and loosely: the rotating body represents the population of judges switching places once a year in a circular system of places as in a carrousel or in White’s (1970) “mobility in loops.” The rotation axis represents metaphorically a pecking order, i.e. a vertical differentiation between the judges and a form of epistemic status reached by the most central “epistemic leaders”. This rotation axis can be pictured as the shaft of the spinning top providing the angular momentum thanks to which the spinning top stays up and represents vertical differentiation helping learning take place in a system where stability comes from movement.
- 9.
About the costs of acquiring and maintaining status in organizations, see Frank (1985).
- 10.
Since this creates dynamics of multilevel networks with different levels of agency, a new family of models is needed to account for such dynamics. This family of models can be a multilevel extension of Snijders (1996) model of dynamics of networks, using characteristics of level 2 network as set of exogenous factors in the evolution of level 1 network, and the other way around. Intermediary level relational infrastructures can be modelled as niches and status, but also using affiliation two-mode data, based on exogenously defined groups. The co-evolution of both level networks is added to the co-evolution of behavior and relational choices. In terms of model specification, new ‘independent’ variables from inter-organizational networks operate at the inter-individual level, and vice-versa. It is also worth proposing a multilevel version of Snijders’ model of dynamics of networks, for example by introducing dual alters or induced potentials, i.e. extended opportunity structures (Lazega et al. 2013), into this formalism.
- 11.
Although institutional locations may seem more important than geographical ones, the social sciences may only be able to endogenize systems of places, i.e. these forms of division of work, with the help of specialists of spatial and organizational movement, i.e. geographers (Bathelt and Glückler 2011; Glückler 2012, 2013; Glückler and Hammer, 2012, forthcoming).
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Lazega, E. (2016). Synchronization Costs in the Organizational Society: Intermediary Relational Infrastructures in the Dynamics of Multilevel Networks. In: Lazega, E., Snijders, T. (eds) Multilevel Network Analysis for the Social Sciences. Methodos Series, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24520-1_3
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