IAS Seminar Series: Elisa Bienenstock (Arizona State University)

This spring semester, the seminar series program of the Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS) will feature several talks focusing on social networks. These will include, among others, a talk by Filiz Garip (Princeton) on Networks, diffusion, and inequality (March 24), a talk by Tom Snijders (April 21), and Eszter Bokányi (Universiteit van Amsterdam) with the title Anatomy of a population-scale social network (May 12). Please find the full seminar program attached.

The seminars are open to all. All seminars will be broadcasted on zoom. If you wish to attend, please contact madelene.topfer@liu.se for the zoom link.

The next talk will be held by Elisa Bienenstock (Arizona State University) on Thursday, February 10  at 14:30CET. Please find the title and abstract below:

The Structure of Collaborative Research at Arizona State University 2000 - 2020

Abstract:

Collaboration, especially interdisciplinary collaboration, is hypothesized to promote innovation and inclusion. This has generated efforts among research enterprises to implement policies that facilitate and incentivize interdisciplinarity. For example, many universities have increased their investment in interdisciplinary centers or providing economic incentives. At Arizona State University (ASU) the administration went beyond standing up centers by replacing traditional disciplinary academic departments with interdisciplinary problem or issue centric departments.  The rationale was that insofar as traditional academic departments act as silos that reinforce disciplinary insolation, an alternative structure that organizes and co-locates researchers based on research interest and coalesces colleagues from multiple disciplinary traditions would provide increased opportunities for the type of cross disciplinary engagement that generates innovation. Since the year 2000 this policy has been implemented across ASU. The purpose of this project is to test whether the restructuring of academic units has generated interdisciplinarity as measured by the characteristics of researchers on collaboration teams that submitted proposals for funded research at ASU between 2000 and 2020. Submitted proposals are the earliest indicator of collaboration that is archived by ASU. Here we present our methodological approach to investigate changes in network structure over time focusing on inclusion based on gender, race / ethnicity and academic rank for this collaboration network from the years 2000, 2010 and 2020.

As part of the presentation, Elisa will also talk about a recent paper she published in Journal of Mathematical Sociology together with Phillip Bonacich: https://doi.org/10.1080/0022250X.2021.1878357