Nosh Contractor's Presentation on Knowledge Networks (4/2/04)

As part of our ongoing series on Communications, Culture, and Policy, funded by the Ford Foundation, our April 2 presentation was entitled, "The Role of Networks in Shaping Policy and How Policy Shapes Networks." The distinguished speaker was Professor Noshir Contractor, who is Professor of Speech Communication, Psychology, Coordinated Science Laboratory, a Research Affiliate of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and a 2003-2004 Beckman Associate of the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

ABSTRACT: Recent advances in digital technologies invite consideration of organizing as a process that is accomplished by global, flexible, adaptive, and ad hoc networks that can be created, maintained, dissolved, and reconstituted with remarkable alacrity. In this presentation, Professor Contractor describes a multi-theoretical multilevel (MTML) model of why we create, maintain, dissolve, and reconstitute knowledge and social networks. Using examples from community participation in the arts, drug trafficking and interdiction, open source movement, terrorist networks, tobacco control, Wi-Fi, WTO protests, and other arenas, Contractor develops a framework to understand how the discovery, diagnosis, and design of social and knowledge networks shape policy and are in turn shaped by policy.

BACKGROUND READING: (1) John, P. (2000). Group and Network Approaches. In J. Peter's, Analysing Public Policy, pp. 66-91. London: Continuum.
(2) Monge, P. and N. Contractor (2003). Multitheoretical Multilevel Theories of Communication and other Organizational Networks. In P. Monge & N. Contractor, Theories of Communication Networks, pp. 293-327. New York: Oxford.

Nosh Contractor's (www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/nosh) research interests include applications of systems theories of complexity to communication, the role of emergent networks within and between organizations, and collaboration technologies in the workplace. His research, funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, NASA, the European Union's Information Society Technology Program, is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked knowledge networks in 21st century organizational forms and communities. He is the lead developer of IKNOW (Inquiring Knowledge Networks On the Web), a community-ware web-based software (http://iknow.spcomm.uiuc.edu) and Blanche, a software program to simulate the dynamics of social networks (http://csu1.spcomm.uiuc.edu/Projects/Teclab/Blanche/). Professor Contractor has published or presented over 75 research papers dealing with communication. His book titled Theories of Communication Networks (co-authored with Peter Monge) was published by Oxford University Press in 2003. It received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the National Communication Association's Organizational Communication Division. He has served on the editorial boards of Communication Studies, Human Communication Research, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Management Communication Quarterly, Organization Science, and the World Wide Web Electronic Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. He has been a consultant, advisor, or reviewer for the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the National Science Foundation's Digital Society and Technology, Information Technology Research and Digital Government Programs, the European Unions Information Society Technology program, the National Cancer Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, and corporations including Boeing, Charles Schwab, Fiat, McKinsey, Procter & Gamble, and Vodafone.

http://www.spcomm.uiuc.edu/users/nosh/books/TCN/chapter10.pdf password=nosh