A Microstructural Approach to Self-Organizing: The Emergence of Attention Networks

Marco Tonellato (), Stefano Tasselli (), Guido Conaldi (), Jürgen Lerner and Alessandro Lomi ()
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Marco Tonellato: University of Trento, 38122 Trento TN, Italy; LMU Munich, 80539 Munich, Germany
Stefano Tasselli: University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4PY, United Kingdom; Erasmus University, 3062 PA Rotterdam, Netherlands; École supérieure de Commerce Rennes School of Business, 35065 Rennes, France
Guido Conaldi: University of Greenwich, London SE10 9LS, United Kingdom
Jürgen Lerner: University of Konstanz, 78464 Konstanz, Germany
Alessandro Lomi: Università della Svizzera italiana, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland

Organization Science, 2024, vol. 35, issue 2, 496-524

Abstract: A recent line of inquiry investigates new forms of organizing as bundles of novel solutions to universal problems of resource allocation and coordination: how to allocate organizational problems to organizational participants and how to integrate participants’ resulting efforts. We contribute to this line of inquiry by reframing organizational attention as the outcome of a concatenation of self-organizing, microstructural mechanisms linking multiple participants to multiple problems, thus giving rise to an emergent attention network. We argue that, when managerial hierarchies are absent and authority is decentralized, observable acts of attention allocation produce interpretable signals that help participants to direct their attention and share information on how to coordinate and integrate their individual efforts. We theorize that the observed structure of an organizational attention network is generated by the concatenation of four interdependent micromechanisms: focusing, reinforcing, mixing, and clustering. In a statistical analysis of organizational problem solving within a large open-source software project, we find support for our hypotheses about the self-organizing dynamics of the observed attention network connecting organizational problems (software bugs) to organizational participants (volunteer contributors). We discuss the implications of attention networks for theory and practice by emphasizing the self-organizing character of organizational problem solving. We discuss the generalizability of our theory to a wider set of organizations in which participants can freely allocate their attention to problems and the outcomes of their allocation are publicly observable without cost.

Keywords: computer-supported collaborative work; decision making and theory of the firm; dynamic analysis/event history methods; mathematical models; organizational attention; organizational design; organization and management theory; open source projects; relational event models; social network analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:35:y:2024:i:2:p:496-524

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