Institutional Logics from the Aggregation of Organizational Networks: Operational Procedures for the Analysis of Counted Data

We address some problems of network aggregation that are central to organizational studies. We show that concepts of network equivalence (including generalizations and special cases of structural equivalence) are relevant to the modeling of the aggregation of social categories in cross-classification tables portraying relations within an organizational field (analogous to one-mode networks). We extend our results to model the dual aggregation of social identities and organizational practices (an example of a two-mode network). We present an algorithm to accomplish such dual aggregation. Within the formal and quantitative framework that we present, we emphasize a unified treatment of (a) aggregation on the basis of structural equivalence (invariance of actors within equivalence sets), (b) the study of variation in relations between structurally equivalent sets, and (c) the close connections between aggregation within organizational networks and multi-dimensional modeling of organizational fields.