Proposed SNA on Governments and Employment Type

Stefan Wirth
Proposed SNA Blog Entry
Not taking the second module

Proposed SNA on Federal Workforce and Employment Type

The U.S. federal government, and the security sector in particular, utilizes the private sector to help accomplish its various missions. While this oftentimes takes the form of physical assets - i.e. the government buys fighter plans from a private company - it can also be services and human capital. In many instances, private sector employees will do the same jobs (on long-term contracts) as their government equivalents and thus the line between private and public employment is somewhat blurred. I'd like to examine the contributions of contractors and private sector employees to government missions - and also examine the contributions of various types of government employees (temporary vs. permanent, political appointees vs. career). The core question would be "What does a government agency's social network look like and how do private contractors fit in and contribute?"

My hypothesis would be that contractors play an important role in fulfilling the agency mission. Of course, another hypothesis could be the opposite - that contractors play a minimal role, or that contractors are isolated and separate from their government employee counterparts. The finding would vary by agency (or subagency) and could be carried out across any part of the government with minimal tweaking.

Much of the necessary data could be ascertained via employment records - name, age, tenure at the job and agency, subagency and office, level and title, career or political appointee, and functional area of expertise. For the private contractors, similar information could be obtained in addition to their company affiliation. To obtain qualitative information on the connections and intensity of connections, a survey could be sent out to a sampling of staff of the agency in question (including contractors) asking "What three people do you rely on the most professionally?" or some other variant similar to the question asked in the consulting case - i.e. a question that answers "Who is really important and critical in this organization?". Another question could be "Who have you talked to most about work projects in the past month?"

Once the results are in, you could use UCINet or other software to examine the linkages and see if patterns emerge. The data could be used to give a rough judge of whether the private employees were linked into the organization well or not, and it could be segmented by company to compare different companies' integration with government employees. This information could be used to help guide the government's policy about contracting and give it additional metrics to evaluate private companies' performance. It would also give a rough look at which people are most relied upon in the organization and what their status is - contractor, civil servant, political appointee, member of the military, etc. Depending on the results, this may create a change in human capital procurement by the government entity.

Additional surveys at the sub-agency level or office level could yield more interesting and usable results, and taken together the information could help change how government bureaucracies are structured in the future.