Page - (000017) - in Knowledge and Networks

5 lective action (Gulati, 1995; Mizruchi, 1994). Networks affect opportunities for action (Burt, 1992). Therefore, the capacity to learn collectively depends on specific relational infra- structures (Lazega, 2016; Lazega, Bar-Hen, Barbillon, & Donnet, 2016) that are available for such a social process. One exemplary source of knowledge and learn- ing is advice-seeking. Advice does more than transmit information that will be used to build knowledge. What is being pragmatically transmitted in an advice relation- ship is also a framework for the evaluation and interpretation of this information, the elements necessary for the evaluation of its appropriateness as a basis for knowl- edge-building. This point is where relational infrastructures such as social status and social niches come in. For example, recognition of status gratifies the advisers by providing them with an incentive to share their knowledge and their experience (Blau, 1964). Advice networks are highly interdependent with collaboration, friendship, and other types of social networks that help mitigate the status rule (Lazega & Pattison, 1999): Both collaboration and friendship can lead to advice and vice-versa. This multiplexity indicates the presence of reference groups or epistemic communities. A longitudinal analysis of advice networks adds to the picture by showing that, in many organizations examined by researchers, advice-seeking converges toward senior members recognized for having the “authority to know”. They provide social approval for specific decisions and contribute to the integration of the organization because they link the individual, group, and organizational levels. This alignment is a key ingredient of intraorganizational collective learning. In addition, the dynamics of advice networks are cyclical: A pattern of centralization—decentralization— recentralization is generated by epistemic leaders seeking a balance between over- load and conflict (Lazega et al., 2016). The described mechanism suggests that epistemic leaders who drive collective knowledge-building through alignments are precisely those who can remain at the top of the epistemic pecking order throughout the cyclical process. Social network studies also point to a number of structural conditions that are conducive to innovation, such as the number of relationships (e.g., Powell, Koput, & Smith-Doerr, 1996; Zaheer, Gözübüyük, & Milanov, 2010), the quality of those relationships (Granovetter, 1985; Uzzi & Lancaster, 2003), and the location of an actor in the overall structure of a network (Whittington, Owen-Smith, & Powell, 2009). Researchers have found various structural concepts to be positively related with innovation, such as actor centrality (Owen-Smith & Powell, 2004; Whittington et al., 2009), boundary-spanning locations between one’s own group and other groups (Krackhardt & Stern, 1988), and intermediate positions between a core and a periphery (Cattani & Ferriani, 2008). Theories of structural holes (Burt, 1992, 2004; Obstfeld, 2005) and of structural folds (Vedres & Stark, 2010) have devel- oped rich explanations of how network location affects the access to information and the co-creation of knowledge. The existence and the quality of relations as well as specific structural characteristics of locations have been theorized as helping or hindering social outcomes such as economic performance or innovativeness. The geography of learning, knowledge, and innovation as a social process between peo- 1 Introduction