SNA All Star: Brian Uzzi

Brian Uzzi is a Professor at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, co-directs the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, is the faculty director of the Kellogg Architectures of Collaboration Initiative (KACI), and holds professorships in Sociology at the Weinberg College of Arts of Sciences and in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at the McCormick School of Engineering. 

Professor Uzzi largely focuses on embeddedness. His paper, “The Sources and Consequences of Embeddedness for the Economic Performance of Organizations: The Network Effect,” examined how network structure affects economic action. The results found that embeddedness is a system of exchanges and firms that tap into network opportunities in their respective markets are more successful than those that maintain distance in their relationships.

In addition to his research into embeddedness, Professor Uzzi, along with Jarrett Spiro, analyzed 474 Broadway musicals between 1945 and 1989 to better understand what features correlated to a successful show. The ultimate conclusion was that for a show to be considered an innovative hit, the team shouldn’t have too much experience working together but also shouldn’t be complete strangers. What was deemed as the “Q” factors found that there needed to be common ground, but not too comfortable of a relationship that would likely produced what had already been done. The Q factor could additionally be rated by the “clusteredness” of the network, leaving an individual with high to low Q value. Successful shows were found to have an embedded network where everyone’s Q was not too low or too high, and reflected the entire network surrounding the production instead of an individual show.