Authors: Catherine Sutton-Brady; Michael Donnan
Recent popular literature has posited a new view of reality or has it? Best-selling books such as Nexus (Buchanan, 2002), Linked (Barabasi, 2002) and Tipping Point (Gladwell, 2000) have discussed in detail the idea of little things making a difference. They also look at networks and their impact on society. ?? we view the economy as a complex network, whose nodes are companies and whose links represent the various economic and financial ties connecting them.? (Barabasi, p2002). Authors exploring complex systems have titled their work ?The Science of Networks?. Their topology of nodes and links is consistent with that long adopted by IMP researchers. Their ‘science of networks? allows for the inclusion of ?hubs? – those nodes with many more links. Network properties include exponential growth, power-law pattern and ?continents?. Networks can be scale?free or random and possess directed or non-directed links. While their empiricism is eclectic ranging from basic geometry to phase transition to nuclear physics much of the experimentation has been computer or internet based.Just what aspects of this science are consistent with the IMP Group concepts developed over the past 20 years will be the focus of this paper. Interestingly it will also investigate how these concepts may further IMP research.
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Publish Year: 2003
Conference: Lugano, Switzerland (2003)