Did you know that social networks can be applied and studied for construction project, teams, and organizations? We all live and work within social networks that vary based on activity, project, prior personal relationship, contractual relationship, preferred beer and more. Specific to construction some basic social networks can be all people that work for a company, the team a company assigns to a project, and all people and companies that contribute to a project informally or through formal contractual relationships. These relationships can be up, down, sideways, or several steps over from you in a traditional supply chain. Researchers led by Paul Chinowski studied and developed a social network model for construction. Across all relationships this model seeks to build experience, reliance, trust, and shared values. These dynamics are built via basic communication, information exchange, and high level knowledge exchange. If you are familiar with partnering, the social network model of construction is essentially high level and (at least somewhat) organic partnering.
So do teams need to use Facebook LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and the rest of the social media platforms to build and maintain social networks? No because these aren't literally social networks but tools to facilitate network activity. Good ol' fashioned values and relationship building can do just fine in creating construction social networks. There has been additional effort in academia to track and study construction social networks via e-mail. The early e-mail based tools focus on who communicated with who don't track content of communication. These is a potential weakness with this method in that the robustness or communication, information exchange, and knowledge exchange cannot be measured. The positive is that people are less concerned about "Big Brother" and more willing to cooperate and share communication data.
Stay tuned for more construction social network topics and discussions.
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