Temporal Brokering: A Measure of Brokerage as a Behavioral Process
提出一种基于时间戳关系事件序列（如邮件、会议记录）的行为度量方法，衡量个体在仲裁与合作之间的中介行为，并验证其有效性和预测能力，为研究网络动态提供新工具。
Extant research in organizational networks has provided critical insights into understanding the benefits of occupying a brokerage position. More recently, researchers have moved beyond the brokerage position to consider the brokering processes (arbitration and collaboration) brokers engage in and their implications for performance. However, brokering processes are typically measured using scales that reflect individuals’ orientation toward engaging in a behavior, rather than the behavior itself. In this article, we propose a measure that captures the behavioral process of brokering. The measure indicates the extent to which actors engage in arbitration versus collaboration based on sequences of time stamped relational events, such as emails, message boards, and recordings of meetings. We demonstrate the validity of our measure as well as its predictive ability. By leveraging the temporal information inherent in sequences of relational events, our behavioral measure of brokering creates opportunities for researchers to explore the dynamics of brokerage and their impact on individuals, and also paves the way for a systematic examination of the temporal dynamics of networks.