Cognitive Structures and Collaboration Patterns in Academia

Abstract

This paper develops a coherent research framework which relates cognitive structure and the collaboration patterns into an integrated socio-knowledge analysis of a given scientific community. The framework extends co-word analysis combining it with social network analysis by introducing a novel model. The new model maps actors from co-authorship networks into a strategic diagram of scientists. The mapping is based on cohesiveness and pervasiveness of issues each author has published in the field. The paper adopts a longitudinal approach to trace knowledge diffusion within peculiarity of a national level socio-knowledge system identifying interplay in between scientists socio-knowledge structures and their research strategies, and their evolutions over time. The case covers Turkish management academia spanning the years from 1922 until 2008. It is seen that, within local community, diffusion of management knowledge is lead by academicians with certain socio-knowledge properties: they have more social ties and more diversified knowledge compared to the rest; knowledge they have is distinct compared to their peers in the network; they hold certain part of their knowledge exclusively, thus knowledge-wise they don't resemble the rest; but they keep a level of common knowledge with the rest of the community. However, academicians publishing at international arena do not show any significantly differing socio-cognitive properties from each other, instead, they are merely embedded in strongly connected groups.