Events
Locally Ensconced and Globally Integrated: How Positions in Network Structure Relate to a Language-Based Model of Group Identification
20 Jun 2024
9:30 am – 11:00 am (UTC+8, HKT)
Webinar
Prof. Amir Goldberg
Prof. Amir Goldberg is a professor of Organizational Behavior and (by courtesy) Sociology at The Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he is the founding co-director of the Computational Culture Lab. He received a PhD in Sociology from Princeton University. His research is focused on using computational methods, with a focus on NLP and LLMs, to model cultural processes in organizations and beyond.
Shifting attachments to social groups are a constant in the modern era. What accounts for variation in the strength of group identification? Whereas prior work has emphasized group-level properties and individual differences, we instead highlight the role of positions within network structure. Distilling insights from prior work on networks and identity, we propose that identification strength is positively related to network cohesion—having contacts who are mutually interconnected. Departing from prevailing accounts, we further propose that identification strength can separately arise through network range—having contacts who inhabit a broad range of network communities. Using the tools of computational linguistics to develop a language-based measure of identification, we find consistent support for the theory using pooled data of internal communications from three disparate organizations.
