Join us at the UChicago Center in Beijing as Professor Burt delivers a talk entitled "Network Gossip: The Social Origins of Reputation."
Event Details
Ronald S. Burt is the Hobart W. Williams Professor of Sociology and Strategy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Join us at the UChicago Center in Beijing as Professor Burt delivers a talk entitled "Network Gossip: The Social Origins of Reputation."
Competitive advantage in networks is created by information breadth, timing, and arbitrage advantages from bridging structural holes. Benefiting from the advantage, however, depends on having sufficient social standing to be accepted as a network broker (formal authority, informal authority, and especially reputation which most allows new talent to rise up).
The processes by which social standing is allocated provide governance in social networks, making the origins of reputation critical to understanding competitive advantage.
In nonhuman networks, reputation emerges in a well-known way within closed networks distributing trusted information from repeated observation (eBay, Amazon, etc.; bandwidth effect).
In human networks, however, closed networks typically play a more active role in defining reputations. Closed networks operate as echo chambers in which people share selected stories in casual gossip intended to strengthen connections with one another (echo effect). Sharing the same opinion again and again makes people feel connected but they become ignorantly certain in their opinions of others — reputations become amplified to persistent positive and negative extremes. In short, reputations are a by-product of people building relations with one another, which has implications for network governance and managing reputation.
Program
6:30 PM-7:00 PM: Registration and Seating
7:00 PM-8:15 PM: Lecture and Q&A
8:15 PM-8:45 PM: Light Refreshments