Participants 2005

I’m a political scientist and I’m a PhD student at the University of Geneva. I’m working in a research program about climate change in Switzerland. My general interests is the implementation of economical instruments in climate policy, but more precisely, I analyse in my PhD thesis the decision process about such instruments in the Swiss climate change policy (Swiss CO2 law principally). Therefore I use SNA to define, who are the most important actors of the so called “climate change elite” in Switzerland. Who’s collaborating with whom, which actors share the same opinion or the same strategy of intervention in the decision making process etc.

If you had asked me three years ago, I would perhaps tell you that academic research must be the last thing I want to do for my career. However, things are always changing! In the end of my MSc study, I took part in a research project as a student assistant in the subject of relevance gap between business practitioners and management academia. Such an experience certainly triggered and cultivated my interests in social science research. Now, I start realizing that research is actually never a boring job at all!

I obtained an LL.M degree from University of Groningen (NL) in International Business Law and an MSc degree in Business Administration from Katholiek University Nijmegen (NL). Now I AM a junior researcher, a Ph.D candidate at the University of Hasselt in Belgium. My research interests include business strategy, innovation strategy, social networks, organizational learning, inter-firm collaborative strategy and corporate governance. I also teach a few courses on strategic management for Master degree students in University of Hasselt.

At my spare time, I like playing soccer, exercising in the gym, making charcoal drawings and enjoying the music. Here you have an opportunity to know me. If you are an academic in a related research field, or simply believe I am a lovely person, you are truly welcome to contact me and share your splendid ideas with me.

I am conducting PhD research in the Department of Politics, University of Exeter, UK into collaboration in welfare implementation networks. Specifically, I am interested in the homelessness sector and the level and nature of interaction between agencies whose remit includes the homeless.  My interest in this arose when I worked as a housing advisor to homeless people and recognized the importance of agencies talking to one another and exchanging information in order to meet the needs of the client.  In the UK, housing, advice and support services to homeless people are delivered through a loose network of agencies across the public, private and NGO sectors.  There is now a statutory duty on agencies to collaborate over specific issues and various incentives to do so, though empirically we know little about network structure, about how much interaction actually takes place and about the bureaucratic politics of the network.  My methods include social network analysis and interviews with practitioners, managers and service users.  Public administration research has focused primarily on the conceptual development of networks rather than robust network analysis though there are now moves in this latter direction.  SNA, in combination with other methods, has promise for researching an infinite number of public policy implementation networks and partnerships, an increasingly dominant mode of public sector organisation in the UK, Europe and beyond.   

Contact: A.Moseley@ex.ac.uk

After finishing my Masters Degree “Organization Studies” at Tilburg University in The Netherlands I started my PhD at Hasselt University in Belgium, in close cooperation with the Eindhoven University of Technology

My project focus is on the impact of competence destroying technological developments on alliance networks in the Semiconductor Industry. The emergence of new technologies that may render the technology of incumbents obsolete will lead to new, entrepreneurial actions both by the firms that developed the competence destroying technology and the current business leaders who are in need to get access to and absorb the new technology. These actions have consequences for the overall alliance network structure. At this moment I’m collecting longitudinal data concerning firm attributes, their relational structure and their innovative output (patents).

With regard to social network analysis my interest is in applying network-related theories and analytical tools to the study of networks of buyers and suppliers at electronic markets for professional services. More specifically, the focus is on the effect of preferred transaction mechanism (e.g. reverse auction) on the formation and performance of buyers' ego-networks, as well as on discovery of patterns of ego-networks evolution.

isandi@essex.ac.uk

Ian Sandison – PhD Candidate in Sociology at Essex. Interested in Addictions – current research “Addictions: Illness, Disease or Crime? Treatment or Rehabilitation?” I intend to use Social Network Analysis in a comparison between the institutional construction of “Crime Reduction Partnerships” and the relationships I am observing in the field between the elements that make up these partnerships in an operational context. That is – how are they dealing with the population I am researching – Street Homeless and Substance Use – as part of a Discourse Analytic approach to the use of the language of the “Disease of Addiction” in non-medical contexts – and how my research population engages or ignores the Discourse.