Thursday, September 18, 2014

SNA All-Star: David Krackhardt

David Krackhardt is Professor of Organizations at the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management and the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon University. He previously held faculty positions at Cornell's Graduate School of Management, the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, INSEAD (France) and the Harvard Business School. He received a BS degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a PhD from the University of California, Irvine, and as such was probably influenced by the work of Lin FreemanMartin Everett and Steve Borgatti. His published works span the fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology and management.

He focuses on how theoretical insights and methodological innovations from network analysis can deepen our understanding of how organizations function. He coined the concept of "cognitive social structures", i.e. when individuals provide their perceptions of the entire network in which they are embedded. He empirically has related these cognitive social structures to turnover, reputations and power in organizations.

Current research interests includes developing models to understand how innovations are diffused, experimenting with new ways to visualize networks, identifying effective leverage points for organizational change, and exploring the roles of Simmelian (super-strong) ties in organizations.


Krackhardt developed the cleverly named KrackPlot, a program for network visualization that allows network analysts to upload graphs from UCINET or Mathematica and produce output in GIFs or other visual formats. Each node can be assigned a number of attributes, denoted by color and shape, and you can click to add new nodes. KrackPlot will assign colors and shapes automatically based on the attributes, or you can designate them.

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