Brian Uzzi
Biographic Data
| ID | 107546 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brian Uzzi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brian |
| FAMILY NAME | Uzzi |
| SIGNATURE | UZZI B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6855-2854 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 977 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 25 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Data, measurement and empirical methods in the science of science
Gender-diverse teams produce more novel and higher-impact scientific ideas
Science’s changing demographics raise new questions about research team diversity and research outcomes. We study mixed-gender research teams, examining 6.6 million papers published across the medical sciences since 2000 and establishing several core findings. First, the fraction of publications by mixed-gender teams has grown rapidly, yet mixed-gender teams continue to be underrepresented compared to the expectations of a null model. Second, des…
Quantifying the selective forgetting and integration of ideas in science and technology
How long will this article be remembered? How long will people reference it in their conversations, and for how many years will other authors cite its findings in their own works? A community's attention to a cultural object decays as time passes, a process known as collective forgetting. Recent work models this decay as the result of two different processes. One linked to communicative memory-memories sustained by human communication-and the oth…
Author Correction
Social Structure and Competition in Interfirm Networks
This chapter aims to develop one of perhaps multiple specifications of embeddedness, a concept that has been used to refer broadly to the contingent nature of economic action with respect to cognition, social structure, institutions, and culture. Research on embeddedness is an exciting area in sociology and economics because it advances understanding of how social structure affects economic life. The chapter addresses propositions about the opera…
Science of science
The whys and wherefores of SciSci The science of science (SciSci) is based on a transdisciplinary approach that uses large data sets to study the mechanisms underlying the doing of science—from the choice of a research problem to career trajectories and progress within a field. In a Review, Fortunato et al. explain that the underlying rationale is that with a deeper understanding of the precursors of impactful science, it will be possible to deve…
Prior shared success predicts victory in team competitions
Timing Matters
Social influence is typically studied after a product is released. Yet, audience expectations and discussions begin before a product’s release. This observation suggests a need to understand adoption processes over a product’s life cycle. To explore pre- and postrelease social influence processes, this article uses survey data from Americans exposed to word of mouth for 309 Hollywood movies released over two and a half years. The data suggest pre…
Atypical Combinations and Scientific Impact
Making an Impact How big a role do unconventional combinations of existing knowledge play in the impact of a scientific paper? To examine this question, Uzzi et al. (p. 468 ) studied 17.9 million research articles across five decades of the Web of Science, the largest repository of scientific research. Scientific work typically appeared to draw on highly conventional, familiar mixtures of knowledge. The highest-impact papers were not the ones tha…
Legally Charged
We examine how forms of a firm's embedding in market relationships affect the size of its spreads – i.e., the difference between the selling price and production costs of its goods and services. Building on Harrison White's work on the relational underpinning of market behavior, we argue that the embeddedness of market transactions in social structures furnishes actors with private information and informal governance benefits that shape spreads b…
Dynamics of Dyads in Social Networks
Embeddedness in social networks is increasingly seen as a root cause of human achievement, social stratification, and actor behavior. In this article, we review sociological research that examines the processes through which dyadic ties form, persist, and dissolve. Three sociological mechanisms are overviewed: assortative mechanisms that draw attention to the role of actors' attributes, relational mechanisms that emphasize the influence of existi…
Multi-University Research Teams
This paper demonstrates that teamwork in science increasingly spans university boundaries, a dramatic shift in knowledge production that generalizes across virtually all fields of science, engineering, and social science. Moreover, elite universities play a dominant role in this shift. By examining 4.2 million papers published over three decades, we found that multi-university collaborations (i) are the fastest growing type of authorship structur…
The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge
We have used 19.9 million papers over 5 decades and 2.1 million patents to demonstrate that teams increasingly dominate solo authors in the production of knowledge. Research is increasingly done in teams across nearly all fields. Teams typically produce more frequently cited research than individuals do, and this advantage has been increasing over time. Teams now also produce the exceptionally high-impact research, even where that distinction was…
The sources and consequences of embeddedness for the economic performance of organizations
Team Assembly Mechanisms Determine Collaboration Network Structure and Team Performance
Agents in creative enterprises are embedded in networks that inspire, support, and evaluate their work. Here, we investigate how the mechanisms by which creative teams self-assemble determine the structure of these collaboration networks. We propose a model for the self-assembly of creative teams that has its basis in three parameters: team size, the fraction of newcomers in new productions, and the tendency of incumbents to repeat previous colla…
Collaboration and Creativity
Small world networks have received disproportionate notice in diverse fields because of their suspected effect on system dynamics. The authors analyzed the small world network of the creative artists who made Broadway musicals from 1945 to 1989. Using original arguments, new statistical methods, and tests of construct validity, they found that the varying “small world” properties of the systemic‐level network of these artists affected their creat…
Embeddedness and Price Formation in the Corporate Law Market
The determination of prices is a key function of markets, yet sociologists are just beginning to study it. Most theorists view prices as a consequence of economic processes. By contrast, we consider how social structure shapes prices. Building on embeddedness arguments and original fieldwork at large law firms, we propose that a firm's embedded relationships influence prices by prompting private-information flows and informal governance arrangeme…
Global Institutions and Networks
The authors motivate social capital arguments at the world-system level through the analysis of world-trade flows and nation status, 1965 to 1980, with specific attention to contextual changes in global trade and stratified effects on participation in trade within it. They generate measures of structural autonomy based on world-trade data from the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Index and incorporate these measures into robust regressio…
Athena Unbound
Why are there so few women scientists? Persisting differences between women's and men's experiences in science make this question as relevant today as it ever was. This book sets out to answer this question, and to propose solutions for the future. Based on extensive research, it emphasizes that science is an intensely social activity. Despite the scientific ethos of universalism and inclusion, scientists and their institutions are not immune to …
Economic Sociology in the New Millennium
Economic sociology is now a sociological specialization with a distinct identity (Smelser and Swedberg 1994). In the twentieth century, it focused on the internal workings of organizations human relations, organization design, and internal labor markets (Baron and Hannan 1994) . Using the economist's black box metaphor of the firm as a point of departure, economic sociologists formulated theories of how organizations influence individual action a…
Embeddedness in the Making of Financial Capital
I investigate how social embeddedness affects an organization's acquisition and cost of financial capital in middle-market banking-a lucrative but understudied financial sector. Using existing theory and original fieldwork, I develop a framework to explain how embeddedness can influence which firms get capital and at what cost. I then statistically examine my claims using national data on small-business lending. At the level of dyadic ties, I fin…
Contingent Employment in British Establishments
Drawing on ILM, HRM, and new structuralist perspectives, we examine how organizational-based factors influence the intensity of two types of contingent worker use, fixed-duration contract hires and part-time employees, using a representative sample of UK establishments. Consistent with an organizational-based perspective, we find that the use of contingent workers depends on organizational-level structures which facilitate or inhibit the adoption…
Towards a Network Perspective on Organizational Decline
Analysis of organizational decline has become central to the study of economy and society. Further advances in this area may fail however, because two major literatures on the topic remain disintegrated and because both lack a sophisticated account of how social structure and interdependencies among organizations affect decline. This paper develops a perspective which tries to overcome these problems. The perspective explains decline through an u…
The Sources and Consequences of Embeddedness for the Economic Performance of Organizations
In this paper, I attempt to advance the concept of embeddedness beyond the level of a programmatic statement by developing a formulation that specifies how embeddedness and network structure affect economic action. On the basis of existing theory and original ethnographies of 23 apparel firms, I develop a systematic scheme that more fully demarcates the unique features, functions, and sources of embeddedness. From this scheme, I derive a set of r…
Holy Theory
Embeddedness in the Making of Financial Capital
I investigate how social embeddedness affects an organization's acquisition and cost of financial capital in middle-market banking-a lucrative but understudied financial sector. Using existing theory and original fieldwork, I develop a framework to explain how embeddedness can influence which firms get capital and at what cost. I then statistically examine my claims using national data on small-business lending. At the level of dyadic ties, I fin…
Collaboration and Creativity
Small world networks have received disproportionate notice in diverse fields because of their suspected effect on system dynamics. The authors analyzed the small world network of the creative artists who made Broadway musicals from 1945 to 1989. Using original arguments, new statistical methods, and tests of construct validity, they found that the varying “small world” properties of the systemic‐level network of these artists affected their creat…
Dynamics of Dyads in Social Networks
Embeddedness in social networks is increasingly seen as a root cause of human achievement, social stratification, and actor behavior. In this article, we review sociological research that examines the processes through which dyadic ties form, persist, and dissolve. Three sociological mechanisms are overviewed: assortative mechanisms that draw attention to the role of actors' attributes, relational mechanisms that emphasize the influence of existi…
Embeddedness and Price Formation in the Corporate Law Market
The determination of prices is a key function of markets, yet sociologists are just beginning to study it. Most theorists view prices as a consequence of economic processes. By contrast, we consider how social structure shapes prices. Building on embeddedness arguments and original fieldwork at large law firms, we propose that a firm's embedded relationships influence prices by prompting private-information flows and informal governance arrangeme…
Economic Sociology in the New Millennium
Economic sociology is now a sociological specialization with a distinct identity (Smelser and Swedberg 1994). In the twentieth century, it focused on the internal workings of organizations human relations, organization design, and internal labor markets (Baron and Hannan 1994) . Using the economist's black box metaphor of the firm as a point of departure, economic sociologists formulated theories of how organizations influence individual action a…
Global Institutions and Networks
The authors motivate social capital arguments at the world-system level through the analysis of world-trade flows and nation status, 1965 to 1980, with specific attention to contextual changes in global trade and stratified effects on participation in trade within it. They generate measures of structural autonomy based on world-trade data from the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Index and incorporate these measures into robust regressio…
Towards a Network Perspective on Organizational Decline
Analysis of organizational decline has become central to the study of economy and society. Further advances in this area may fail however, because two major literatures on the topic remain disintegrated and because both lack a sophisticated account of how social structure and interdependencies among organizations affect decline. This paper develops a perspective which tries to overcome these problems. The perspective explains decline through an u…
Contingent Employment in British Establishments
Drawing on ILM, HRM, and new structuralist perspectives, we examine how organizational-based factors influence the intensity of two types of contingent worker use, fixed-duration contract hires and part-time employees, using a representative sample of UK establishments. Consistent with an organizational-based perspective, we find that the use of contingent workers depends on organizational-level structures which facilitate or inhibit the adoption…
Prior shared success predicts victory in team competitions
Data, measurement and empirical methods in the science of science
Quantifying the selective forgetting and integration of ideas in science and technology
How long will this article be remembered? How long will people reference it in their conversations, and for how many years will other authors cite its findings in their own works? A community's attention to a cultural object decays as time passes, a process known as collective forgetting. Recent work models this decay as the result of two different processes. One linked to communicative memory-memories sustained by human communication-and the oth…
Timing Matters
Social influence is typically studied after a product is released. Yet, audience expectations and discussions begin before a product’s release. This observation suggests a need to understand adoption processes over a product’s life cycle. To explore pre- and postrelease social influence processes, this article uses survey data from Americans exposed to word of mouth for 309 Hollywood movies released over two and a half years. The data suggest pre…
Legally Charged
We examine how forms of a firm's embedding in market relationships affect the size of its spreads – i.e., the difference between the selling price and production costs of its goods and services. Building on Harrison White's work on the relational underpinning of market behavior, we argue that the embeddedness of market transactions in social structures furnishes actors with private information and informal governance benefits that shape spreads b…
The sources and consequences of embeddedness for the economic performance of organizations
Holy Theory
The Sources and Consequences of Embeddedness for the Economic Performance of Organizations
In this paper, I attempt to advance the concept of embeddedness beyond the level of a programmatic statement by developing a formulation that specifies how embeddedness and network structure affect economic action. On the basis of existing theory and original ethnographies of 23 apparel firms, I develop a systematic scheme that more fully demarcates the unique features, functions, and sources of embeddedness. From this scheme, I derive a set of r…
Towards a Network Perspective on Organizational Decline
Analysis of organizational decline has become central to the study of economy and society. Further advances in this area may fail however, because two major literatures on the topic remain disintegrated and because both lack a sophisticated account of how social structure and interdependencies among organizations affect decline. This paper develops a perspective which tries to overcome these problems. The perspective explains decline through an u…
Contingent Employment in British Establishments
Drawing on ILM, HRM, and new structuralist perspectives, we examine how organizational-based factors influence the intensity of two types of contingent worker use, fixed-duration contract hires and part-time employees, using a representative sample of UK establishments. Consistent with an organizational-based perspective, we find that the use of contingent workers depends on organizational-level structures which facilitate or inhibit the adoption…
Embeddedness in the Making of Financial Capital
I investigate how social embeddedness affects an organization's acquisition and cost of financial capital in middle-market banking-a lucrative but understudied financial sector. Using existing theory and original fieldwork, I develop a framework to explain how embeddedness can influence which firms get capital and at what cost. I then statistically examine my claims using national data on small-business lending. At the level of dyadic ties, I fin…
Athena Unbound
Why are there so few women scientists? Persisting differences between women's and men's experiences in science make this question as relevant today as it ever was. This book sets out to answer this question, and to propose solutions for the future. Based on extensive research, it emphasizes that science is an intensely social activity. Despite the scientific ethos of universalism and inclusion, scientists and their institutions are not immune to …
Economic Sociology in the New Millennium
Economic sociology is now a sociological specialization with a distinct identity (Smelser and Swedberg 1994). In the twentieth century, it focused on the internal workings of organizations human relations, organization design, and internal labor markets (Baron and Hannan 1994) . Using the economist's black box metaphor of the firm as a point of departure, economic sociologists formulated theories of how organizations influence individual action a…
Global Institutions and Networks
The authors motivate social capital arguments at the world-system level through the analysis of world-trade flows and nation status, 1965 to 1980, with specific attention to contextual changes in global trade and stratified effects on participation in trade within it. They generate measures of structural autonomy based on world-trade data from the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Index and incorporate these measures into robust regressio…
Embeddedness and Price Formation in the Corporate Law Market
The determination of prices is a key function of markets, yet sociologists are just beginning to study it. Most theorists view prices as a consequence of economic processes. By contrast, we consider how social structure shapes prices. Building on embeddedness arguments and original fieldwork at large law firms, we propose that a firm's embedded relationships influence prices by prompting private-information flows and informal governance arrangeme…
Team Assembly Mechanisms Determine Collaboration Network Structure and Team Performance
Agents in creative enterprises are embedded in networks that inspire, support, and evaluate their work. Here, we investigate how the mechanisms by which creative teams self-assemble determine the structure of these collaboration networks. We propose a model for the self-assembly of creative teams that has its basis in three parameters: team size, the fraction of newcomers in new productions, and the tendency of incumbents to repeat previous colla…
Collaboration and Creativity
Small world networks have received disproportionate notice in diverse fields because of their suspected effect on system dynamics. The authors analyzed the small world network of the creative artists who made Broadway musicals from 1945 to 1989. Using original arguments, new statistical methods, and tests of construct validity, they found that the varying “small world” properties of the systemic‐level network of these artists affected their creat…
The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge
We have used 19.9 million papers over 5 decades and 2.1 million patents to demonstrate that teams increasingly dominate solo authors in the production of knowledge. Research is increasingly done in teams across nearly all fields. Teams typically produce more frequently cited research than individuals do, and this advantage has been increasing over time. Teams now also produce the exceptionally high-impact research, even where that distinction was…
The sources and consequences of embeddedness for the economic performance of organizations
Multi-University Research Teams
This paper demonstrates that teamwork in science increasingly spans university boundaries, a dramatic shift in knowledge production that generalizes across virtually all fields of science, engineering, and social science. Moreover, elite universities play a dominant role in this shift. By examining 4.2 million papers published over three decades, we found that multi-university collaborations (i) are the fastest growing type of authorship structur…
Dynamics of Dyads in Social Networks
Embeddedness in social networks is increasingly seen as a root cause of human achievement, social stratification, and actor behavior. In this article, we review sociological research that examines the processes through which dyadic ties form, persist, and dissolve. Three sociological mechanisms are overviewed: assortative mechanisms that draw attention to the role of actors' attributes, relational mechanisms that emphasize the influence of existi…
Legally Charged
We examine how forms of a firm's embedding in market relationships affect the size of its spreads – i.e., the difference between the selling price and production costs of its goods and services. Building on Harrison White's work on the relational underpinning of market behavior, we argue that the embeddedness of market transactions in social structures furnishes actors with private information and informal governance benefits that shape spreads b…
Atypical Combinations and Scientific Impact
Making an Impact How big a role do unconventional combinations of existing knowledge play in the impact of a scientific paper? To examine this question, Uzzi et al. (p. 468 ) studied 17.9 million research articles across five decades of the Web of Science, the largest repository of scientific research. Scientific work typically appeared to draw on highly conventional, familiar mixtures of knowledge. The highest-impact papers were not the ones tha…
Timing Matters
Social influence is typically studied after a product is released. Yet, audience expectations and discussions begin before a product’s release. This observation suggests a need to understand adoption processes over a product’s life cycle. To explore pre- and postrelease social influence processes, this article uses survey data from Americans exposed to word of mouth for 309 Hollywood movies released over two and a half years. The data suggest pre…
Social Structure and Competition in Interfirm Networks
This chapter aims to develop one of perhaps multiple specifications of embeddedness, a concept that has been used to refer broadly to the contingent nature of economic action with respect to cognition, social structure, institutions, and culture. Research on embeddedness is an exciting area in sociology and economics because it advances understanding of how social structure affects economic life. The chapter addresses propositions about the opera…
Science of science
The whys and wherefores of SciSci The science of science (SciSci) is based on a transdisciplinary approach that uses large data sets to study the mechanisms underlying the doing of science—from the choice of a research problem to career trajectories and progress within a field. In a Review, Fortunato et al. explain that the underlying rationale is that with a deeper understanding of the precursors of impactful science, it will be possible to deve…
Prior shared success predicts victory in team competitions
Author Correction
Quantifying the selective forgetting and integration of ideas in science and technology
How long will this article be remembered? How long will people reference it in their conversations, and for how many years will other authors cite its findings in their own works? A community's attention to a cultural object decays as time passes, a process known as collective forgetting. Recent work models this decay as the result of two different processes. One linked to communicative memory-memories sustained by human communication-and the oth…
Gender-diverse teams produce more novel and higher-impact scientific ideas
Science’s changing demographics raise new questions about research team diversity and research outcomes. We study mixed-gender research teams, examining 6.6 million papers published across the medical sciences since 2000 and establishing several core findings. First, the fraction of publications by mixed-gender teams has grown rapidly, yet mixed-gender teams continue to be underrepresented compared to the expectations of a null model. Second, des…
Data, measurement and empirical methods in the science of science
Sociology (19 works) · Economics (11 works) · Social science (11 works) · Business (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Embeddedness (7 works) · scientometrics and bibliometrics research (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works)