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Boundary salience: The interactive effect of organizational status distance and geographical proximity on coauthorship tie formation
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Boundary salience: The interactive effect of organizational status distance and geographical proximity on coauthorship tie formation

Dali Ma, V K Narayanan, ChuanRen Liu and Ehsan Fakharizadi
Social networks, v 63, pp 162-173
Oct 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2020.07.004

Abstract

Boundary Coauthorship Geography Homophily Knowledge Status
•Our findings support a novel “salience hypothesis”, which suggests that geographical proximity heightens the salience of organizational status boundaries, thereby impeding interpersonal professional tie formation across these boundaries.•Whereas geographical proximity reproduces existing circuits of knowledge exchange among people from status-similar departments, geographical distance plays an important role in knowledge production across status groups, which is one reason that academia is not completely fragmented along the lines of organizational status distinctions.•Our study promotes an organizational perspective for the study of interpersonal professional tie formation – a hitherto largely overlooked perspective. Our study examines the interactive effect of organizational status distance and geographical proximity on interpersonal professional tie formation. Whereas Blau (1977, 1994) proposes that geographical proximity will weaken the negative effect of organizational status distance on professional tie formation, our analysis of co-authorship in academic accounting over a 30-year period shows that geographical proximity between departments strengthens the negative effect of organizational status distance on the likelihood of coauthorship tie formation. These findings support our proposed “salience hypothesis”, which suggests that geographical proximity heightens the salience of organizational status boundary and consequently impedes people from status-distant organizations to form collaborative ties.

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