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Information Systems Research Forum
Examining the potential for non-traditional applications of SNA: a case study in the UK independent television and film production sectors
Lynne Nikolychuk, Centre for Cultural, Media and Creative Industries Research (CMCI) King's College London and
Pamela Abbott, Department of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University
Thursday 26 November 2009
1200-1330
Room NAB 4.21
view slides from this presentation
read background paper
The UK’s independent television and film production sectors have been experiencing considerable upheaval in relation to their traditional organising models and modes of production. Ongoing advancement of digital technologies, content producer ingenuity, and policies aimed to exploit the economic potential of these two sectors on a global basis across multiple platforms, suggest that understanding the new rules of the game, as they emerge, are likely to be key input factors to future success, in both cultural and commercial terms.Unlike some industries, independent producers of UK television programmes and films have long recognised the importance (and perhaps necessity) of collaboration, on an individual and interorganisational basis. While there is some consensus in the literature that the media sectors, which traditionally cover forms of mass communication such as television, are poised to be at the forefront of technological innovation such as ICT-enabled on-demand TV, digitized music and e-enabled publishing in the newspaper and magazine domains (Negroponte 1996; Zwass 2003), there is little research that analyses in-depth the actual processes of change occurring at an organisational level.
Key aspects of this emerging business model landscape relate to how existing capabilities and organisational practices may be evolving in this changing environment and the extent to which adaptations appear to be advancing both economic and non-economic driven expectations. A central research question is how does this reconfiguring process lead to the emergence of new business models? How might studying the changing terrain of interorganisational networks in this sector help to inform us about the ways in which the sector is evolving to seek new ways to achieve both its cultural and economic objectives?
Social network analysis (SNA) (Scott 2000) has been identified as an appropriate analytical tool to help guide this undertaking since it has traditionally been used for analysing relational data and has been applied to similar research problems, for example, in determining the nature of interorganisational relationships and the role of participants therein (Mizruchi, Galaskiewicz 1993; Oliver, Ebers 1998). Applications of SNA as an analytical tool, however, have been criticised for being too concerned with mathematical precision, restricted to static representations of networks and limited in their ability to represent the dynamic or processual aspects of network formation and functioning (Scott 2000; Carley 2003; Stern 1979). This paper seeks to examine the applicability of traditional representational and analytical approaches of SNA to the problem domain and explores the development of alternative approaches to SNA that may more suitably realise our stated research objectives.
Specifically, the paper will examine traditional approaches to SNA within this and similar problem domains, the relevant critiques thereof and will present the approach to SNA used in this analysis. This approach attempts to incorporate techniques that can demonstrate how changes within the structure of the inter-organisational relationships along the production value chain are occurring in terms of 1) types and numbers of entities involved, 2) nature, frequency and sequence of exchanges among entities and 3) functions of entities. The main premise is that diagrammatic representations can be usefully coupled with descriptions of the processes by which these changes are occurring. By representing structural changes in this way, one can derive inferences not only about how value creation is being reshaped but also about shifts in the balance of power among value chain participants. This is our theoretical point of departure from many studies undertaken so far from an SNA approach.
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