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Despite its undoubted centrality in modern society, Love has not received the attention it deserves in the study of organizations. Among the reasons for this avoidance is the fact that love is passionate and not authoritative; personal and subjective but not public. To understand the way organizational research can incorporate love, I explore and discuss three interweaving constructs. Eros (or a tale of the self) calls for an expression of the individuality in organizations, in terms of creativity, sense making and experience. Philia (or a tale of trust) contributes to explore trustworthy relationships, welcoming the other and enabling individuals to flourish in the workplace. Agape (or a tale of compassion) refers to generalized love for humanity and opens to the understanding of compassionate leadership. In the discussion, I call for new directions in the study of love as the organization and the organization as love.

This study examines the relationship between the structure of professional networks and patterns of inter-professional knowledge transfer in the healthcare setting. Collecting survey data and qualitative evidence from 118 professionals in a hospital department, we used theory on the sociology of professions and social networks to investigate patterns of knowledge transfer between doctors and nurses. First we found that members of different professions tend to be embedded in distinctive professional cliques, which in turn inhibit effective inter-professional knowledge transfer. Network structure, however, combines with individual characteristics in predicting knowledge transfer patterns. By occupying central positions in closely knit networks, clinical directors can facilitate knowledge transfer patterns between doctors and nurses. And actors who are legitimated both intra-professionally and inter-professionally to occupy brokerage positions in social networks, namely junior doctors and nurse managers, are more likely to gain access to non-redundant, valuable knowledge. The overall picture is one of network structure interplaying with the characteristics of individual actors in shaping the dynamics of professional interactions.

In this article, we provide an overview of social network research in health care, with a focus on social interactions between professionals in organizations. We begin by introducing key concepts defining the social network approach, including network density, centrality, and brokerage. We then review past and current research on the antecedents of health care professionals' social networks—including demographic attributes, professional groups, and organizational arrangements—and their consequences—including satisfaction at work, leadership, behaviors, knowledge transfer, diffusion of innovation, and performance. Finally, we examine future directions for social network research in health care, focusing on micro–macro linkages and network dynamics.

This Element provides an innovative angle for understanding organizational social networks, engaging in empirical network research, and nurturing further theoretical development on the role of social interactions and connectedness in modern organizations.

The mechanisms by which social networks and organizational vocabularies combine jointly to affect communication patterns across organizational boundaries remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we examine the mutually constitutive relation between the network ties through which organizational members communicate with each other and the vocabularies that they use to describe their organization. We suggest that the dynamic structure of social networks and organizational vocabularies is contingent on the formal design of organizational subunits. Within subunit boundaries, members who interact with each other are more likely to develop similar vocabularies over time. Interestingly, between subunits, the more two members share similar organizational vocabularies, the more likely they are to form a tie over time. We find empirical evidence for these arguments in a longitudinal study conducted among the managers of a multiunit organization. Organizational vocabularies, we suggest, may sustain communication patterns across organizational boundaries, thus bridging cultural holes within organizations.

Although the relationship between competition and firm innovation has long been of scholarly interest, prior research has predominantly considered changes in internal research and development (R&D) as a strategic response to competitors' actions. In this study, we focus on one of the most important and commonly observed contractual mechanisms used to acquire external technologies: technology licensing. Surprisingly, licensing has been mostly overlooked by prior studies examining the effect of competition on firms' allocation of R&D. We take into account the unique properties of licensing and systematically link them to the demands arising from the competitive pressure caused by rivals' launches of new products. Furthermore, we discuss how licensing-in decisions ultimately shape a firm's subsequent innovation in areas where they are threatened by competitors and how such innovation depends on the cumulative R&D investments inside the organization into which licensed knowledge is added. We test our theoretical model through a longitudinal design that tracks the licensing-in and innovation outcomes of firms in the global biopharmaceutical industry. Accounting for the endogenous selection of firms into licensing, our findings illustrate that licensing-in is motivated by competitive pressures. We also find that licensing-in increases a firm's capacity to innovate in areas where competitors have exerted pressure, particularly in the presence of cumulative R&D investments. In so doing, the paper anchors technology licensing as a key organizational action that helps increase our understanding of the important relationship between competition and innovation.

AbstractThe aims of this study were to investigate the presence, possible sources, and potential ecological risks of synthetic musk fragrances in freshwaters and sediments of the main tributaries of a deep subalpine lake in Northern Italy. The total musk concentrations ranged from few ng L−1 up to values > 500 ng L−1, depending on river characteristics: water flow and the presence of wastewater effluents proved to be the main factors affecting fragrance concentrations. The water flow may indeed dilute fragrance input mainly deriving from treated wastewaters. Good correlations (determination coefficients > 0.60) between synthetic fragrances concentrations and parameters related to anthropogenic impacts confirmed this hypothesis: synthetic fragrances were mainly detected in most polluted rivers crossing urbanized areas. Sediment analysis highlighted accumulation of fragrances in this matrix. Concentrations of synthetic fragrances up to 329 ng g−1 organic carbon were measured in sediments of the most contaminated rivers Boesio and Bardello, which also show the highest nutrient content. The preliminary environmental risk assessment revealed that present levels of synthetic musk fragrances do not pose any risk to the studied environmental compartments. However, a probable medium risk level was evidenced during the dry season in the most contaminated rivers Boesio and Bardello. For these reasons, small rivers draining urbanized watersheds and affected by wastewater effluents should be considered synthetic musk contamination hotspots that warrant further research.

A recent line of inquiry investigates new forms of organizing as bundles of novel solutions to universal problems of resource allocation and coordination: how to allocate organizational problems to organizational participants and how to integrate participants' resulting efforts. We contribute to this line of inquiry by reframing organizational attention as the outcome of a concatenation of self-organizing, microstructural mechanisms linking multiple participants to multiple problems, thus giving rise to an emergent attention network. We argue that, when managerial hierarchies are absent and authority is decentralized, observable acts of attention allocation produce interpretable signals that help participants to direct their attention and share information on how to coordinate and integrate their individual efforts. We theorize that the observed structure of an organizational attention network is generated by the concatenation of four interdependent micromechanisms: focusing, reinforcing, mixing, and clustering. In a statistical analysis of organizational problem solving within a large open-source software project, we find support for our hypotheses about the self-organizing dynamics of the observed attention network connecting organizational problems (software bugs) to organizational participants (volunteer contributors). We discuss the implications of attention networks for theory and practice by emphasizing the self-organizing character of organizational problem solving. We discuss the generalizability of our theory to a wider set of organizations in which participants can freely allocate their attention to problems and the outcomes of their allocation are publicly observable without cost. Funding: Financial support for this work was provided by the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung [Grant 100018_150126] ("Relational event modes for bipartite networks with application to collaborative problem solving," P.I. Alessandro Lomi) and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [Grant 321869138] ("Statistical analysis of time-stamped multi-actor events in social networks," P.I. Jüergen Lerner). Supplemental Material: The supplemental video containing the dynamic visualization of the data is available at https://zenodo.org/record/7564503 and in the e-companion (available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1674 ).