Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> Pieces of marble or similar natural stone having a plurality of plane faces are stacked in a liquid-tight container. Said pieces are arranged with their plane faces facing each other so as to form a plurality of parallel layers. Thereafter, a vacuum is applied in said container and, while maintaining the latter under vacuum, a fluid hardenable binding composition, such as a synthetic resin, is then poured into said container. Said composition flows down through the interstices existing in and around the stack of pieces, until it completely covers said stack. Thereafter, the inside of the container is brought to atmospheric or superatmospheric pressure, thus causing said binding composition to thoroughly penetrate into all said interstices and into all the cavities of the pieces opening on their surface, and then said binding composition is allowed to harden. <s> BIB001 </s> Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> This study examines the disparity between formal plans and actual networks in practice for emergency services in a local government setting. This study found that the accuracy of participants'collective perception of the network has a strong positive relationship with the centrality of the lead agency within each emergency support function. In addition, the centrality of influence within and collective accuracy about the network may be key indicators for creating network effectiveness. Finally, this study offers a simplified network analysis process to assist policy makers in creating more effective network structures for their emergency management activities. <s> BIB002 </s> Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> This article examines the problem of effective interagency communication among organizations and the role of information technologies to achieve effective communication and decision-making goals in emergencies. It explores what factors contribute to effective interorganizational communication and decision making and what factors inhibit their development. The theoretical framework draws on the literature of emergency communication and social capital, with a particular focus on communication and decision making under conditions of uncertainty. The study applies this framework to study the relationships that emerged among public, private, and non-profit organizations following the World Trade Center disaster on September 11, 2001, in New York City. The article indicates the importance of developing a strong communication system with other organizations before a disaster occurs to establish appropriate communication in which effective interagency coordination will take place at the time of a disaster. <s> BIB003 </s> Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> Boards of directors have a number of roles. The board's monitoring function has been the subject of much work. Less examined is the role that the board has in setting company strategy. This paper uses agency and network perspectives in developing and testing the relationship between board characteristics and involvement in strategic decision making. Using primary and secondary data, our results suggest that the level of board involvement in strategic decision making is related to a number of governance variables. We demonstrate that involvement is generally lower where boards are highly interlocked. We also show that certain types of board interlocks - namely horizontal (same industry) and those involving direct links with the banking sector - are particularly associated with this negative effect. There is weaker evidence that board strategic involvement is lower where the roles of company chief executive and chair are combined. We find no evidence that factors such as board size, or the percentage of outside directors per se are related to board involvement in strategic decision making. In doing so, this paper adds to the growing literature synthesizing the structural features and processes of boards. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006. <s> BIB004 </s> Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> This article argues that cognition is central to performance in emergency management. Cognition is defined as the capacity to recognize the degree of emerging risk to which a community is exposed and to act on that information. Using the case of Hurricane Katrina to illustrate the collapse of the standard model of emergency management without a clear focus on the role of cognition, the author reframes the concept of intergovernmental crisis management as a complex, adaptive system. That is, the system needs to adjust and adapt its performance to fit the demands of an ever-changing physical, engineered, and social environment. The terms of cognition, communication, coordination, and control are redefined in ways that fit the reality of practice in extreme events. A reframed intergovernmental crisis management system may be conceived as a dynamic interorganizational system that is characterized by four primary decision points: (1) detection of risk, (2) recognition and interpretation of risk for the immediate context, (3) communication of risk to multiple organizations in a wider region, and (4) self-organization and mobilization of a collective, community response system to reduce risk and respond to danger. <s> BIB005 </s> Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> The Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) is a mutual aid agreement and partnership that allows states to assist one another in responding to natural and man-made disasters, often in advance of federal disaster assistance. This article examines EMAC’s response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in order to address the significant need for analysis of emergency management at the state level. A content analysis of news reports, government documents, and reports from a number of institutions was performed to determine the volume and direction of EMAC’s performance and its transactions during the response operations. The authors find a lack of EMAC training among responders, potentially reducing communication and coordination and the efficiency and effectiveness of response operations. A network analysis assessed the relationships among the responding organizations to coordinate their emergency response operations. <s> BIB006 </s> Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> This article advances two general hypotheses, bonding and bridging, to explain the process by which local governments decide whether to enter into contracts. The characteristics of goods and services are important factors in these decisions. In high asset-specificity transactions, the bridging hypothesis predicts local governments will establish ties with only a few “high status” actors, whereas in transactions for services with measurement difficulties, the bonding hypothesis predicts local governments will establish ties with partners of their existing partners to pool resources and reduce commitment risks. The general hypotheses are tested using agreements for law enforcement activities linking 66 actors in the Orlando-Kissimmee metropolitan area during five time periods (i.e., between 1986 and 2003). Using simulation investigation network analysis (SIENA) techniques, this study finds strong statistical support for these hypotheses. <s> BIB007 </s> Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> Networks of interlocal agreements (ILAs) provide a way for municipal governments in a fragm ented region to cooperate on services, and these networks may be especially likely to form when local government officials are linked through interpersonal networks. Drawing on insights from Williams’ Lifestyle Model of Metropolitan Politics and Frederickson’s theory of administrative conjunctions, this paper uses network analytic methods to examine the structure of ILA networks, and to assess the impact of governing officials’ interpersonal networks on the probability of ILAs forming between cities. Four-four local governments in the Detroit metropolitan area provide the context for this study. Our findings show that these municipalities cooperate more extensively for system maintenance functions, such as for transportation infrastructure and public works. More importantly, we find that any given cluster of municipalities has an increased probability of cooperating through ILAs when their senior administrators participate in the same local professional associations. The same effects hold true for elected executives’ networking with counterparts, and for some functions, these electoral conjunctions serve as even stronger predictors of ILA usage than administration conjunctions. <s> BIB008 </s> Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> This research focused on the interorganizational and intergovernmental response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. The study used the concepts from the network and partnerships literature and used current techniques of network analysis. The study found that the use of intergovernmental and interorganizational response to coordinate complex operations in multiorganizational environments of catastrophic disasters was not successful in responding to both Hurricane Katrina and Rita in 2005. The research suggests that more investment should be made in community capacity building at the local and state levels for successful and effective partnerships in responding to catastrophic disasters. In this research, the local and state levels are shown to be faster in response and future research should focus on local, state, and federal resources coordination in response to catastrophic disasters. <s> BIB009 </s> Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> Social network analysis and centrality measures are used with the UCINET software program to analyze the outcomes of an evolving collaborative network through the relationship structures and processes of an interorganizational governance network. The study data were collected from content analyses of newspapers, situation reports, and organizational documents. In the context of disaster response networks, the structure and performance of the planned networks are compared to the actual networks. The results indicate that the September 11 response network's performance differed from that of the Federal Response Plan network and that the outcomes of the Hurricane Katrina response network showed different structures from those of the National Response Plan. The insights generated about the structural differences between these formal versus informal and planned versus actual networks demonstrate the utility of the measurements of network performance outcomes discussed here. <s> BIB010 </s> Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> This paper compares over a 12‐year period (1) patterns of contracting between a state transportation agency and its prime contractors providing engineering design services with (2) patterns between these prime contractors and their subcontractors. We find evidence of different contracting patterns at each level that emerge over time and coexist in the same contracting context. While patterns at the agency–prime level are characterized by repeated contracts, patterns at the prime–sub level indicate fewer repeats and more contractor turnover. Implications for outsourcing practice and theory are discussed. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. <s> BIB011 </s> Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> Social network analysis has been one of the fastest growing and most influential areas of recent times. This sparkling Handbook offers an unrivalled resource. Systematically, it introduces readers to the key concepts, substantive topics, central methods, and prime debates. The result is a peerless resource for teachers and students. Instead of consulting a variety of books and journal articles, the Handbook offers a one-stop guide that will be used by readers for decades to come. <s> BIB012 </s> Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> Tertius iungens brokerage is unique within the dominant brokerage conceptualizations in sociology. While most brokerage research finds that brokers reap rewards from mediating relationships in ways that keep actors apart, iungens research finds that brokers can have an interest in joining previously disconnected actors and sustaining these relationships. This paper expands the explanatory potential of iungens brokerage by building a multidimensional theoretical framework that explains transnational connecting processes, generating insights beyond the traditional focus on network structures into the under-researched area of brokerage across institutions. The paper synthesizes streams of brokerage research that have developed in relative isolation from each other to elucidate how organizational brokers and their staffs create transnational structural and cognitive connections that draw actors together into intersectoral networks that cross two or more nationally organized regulatory regimes and cultural sys... <s> BIB013 </s> Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> This study describes the interlocking networks of corporate directors serving on publicly listed corporate boards and those on the boards of nonprofit organizations in Western Australia in 2006. When this study was undertaken, the state was the beneficiary of a booming economy in resource development prior to the global financial crisis, yielding a substantial number of resource companies with their headquarters in Perth, the capital city of Western Australia. Through social network analysis using NetDraw, we trace the extent of interpersonal connections of prominent individuals who serve on these boards in this relatively isolated state in Australia. The network figures demonstrate the inner circle of companies and nonprofits with their interlocking directorships that suggest the growing interpenetration among the state, the market, and civil society. As a result of reduced government funding during the last two decades in Western Australia, nonprofit organizations have had to use market strategies to increase their revenues, which is one factor that has led to this greater interdependence between previously separate groups. Thus, market forces have blurred the boundaries that once separated private companies from nonprofit organizations, increasing the interlocking nature of their board directors. <s> BIB014 </s> Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> The advocacy coalition framework (ACF) pays special attention to ‘‘so-called’’ policy brokers when explaining policy change. However, this prominent policy approach neither clearly defines who the policy brokers are nor identifies under which institutional rules they have an influence on policy processes and outputs. This article thus formulates two theoretical hypotheses that complement the ACF and then proceeds to undertake the first empirical testing of these hypotheses within the Swiss climate policy (1990–2008). The empirical results show that, in the case under investigation, the strategic interest-based behavior of two policy brokers (i.e., one public administration and one political party), as well as two institutionalized veto points (i.e., optional referendum and parliamentary committee), are crucial factors explaining policy brokers’ influence on policy process and change. <s> BIB015 </s> Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> Baseline models have been used in the analysis of social networks as a way to understand how empirical networks differ from “random” ones. For the purposes of social network analysis, a “random” network is one chosen—at random—from a population of possible graphs derived from a given generating function. Although these principled hypothesis tests have a long history, many of their properties and extensions to multiple data structures—here, specifically two-mode data—have been overlooked. This article focused on applications of different baseline models to two data sets: donations and voting of the 111th U.S. Congress, and organizations involved in forums on watershed policy in San Francisco, USA. Tests using each data set, but with different baseline reference distributions, will illustrate the range of possible questions baseline models can address and the differences between them. The ability to apply different models and generate a constellation of results provides a deeper understanding of the structure of the system. <s> BIB016 </s> Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> In the public management literature, network effects are studied primarily at two levels: (a) the level of the interorganizational network as a whole and (b) the level of individual organizations’ networking behavior. This article combines the two levels within one theoretical framework and derives hypotheses about network effects on organizational performance for each level of analysis. The hypotheses are tested on a data set of five interorganizational networks in Dutch higher education. Within these five intercollege networks, we study graduates’ satisfaction with the educational program offered by 91 colleges for cohorts in the years 2002 to 2005 (n = 18,159). The results show that intercollege networks with clear patterns of coordination have significantly more satisfied graduates than networks of colleges characterized by either highly dense or sparse relations. For individual colleges, the results indicate that colleges’ participation in subnetworks positively affects graduate satisfaction, whereas... <s> BIB017 </s> Conducting Content Analysis of Documents in Network Research: A Review of Recent Scholarship <s> Research Foci and Network Data Drawn from Documents <s> Online communities form a challenging and still-evolving field for social network research. We highlight two themes that are at the core of social network literature: formative processes and structures, and discuss how these might be relevant in the context of online communities. Processes of tie formation might evolve differently in online communities. Second, we discuss how network structures emerge in different ways than previously studied, and should therefore be interpreted differently. <s> BIB018
In recent years, researchers drew various types of network data from documents in public administration to address a variety of questions. As Table 2 shows, there are various types of network data drawn from documents. The 18 articles included in this study addressed various management and policy issues, ranging from emergency management to economic development, transportation, education, and public health. A wide range of management and policy domains. As Figure 1 shows, among the 18 articles, 6 (33%) were on emergency management. In the field of emergency management, scholars analyzed governmental documents such as comprehensive emergency management plans (CEMPs) of local governments, after-action reports, and situation reports from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to collect network data (e.g., BIB002 BIB005 BIB003 BIB009 BIB006 BIB010 ; Figure 1 . Types of network data.  . Scholars examined CEMPs to identify lists of primary or and support agencies in the face of emergencies. Furthermore, in the analyses of CEMPs researchers examine the planned network of emergency management and the interorganizational interactions defined in the documents BIB002 . Analysis of afteraction reports and situation reports can capture the actual response networks, involving the interactions between organizations during and after disasters  BIB003 . The analysis of newspaper articles such as those from the New York Times can help capture cross-sector collaboration in emergency management, especially the engagement of nongovernmental actors in response to disasters. Scholars examined not only the lead organizations but also the structural characteristics of the actual response networks BIB010 . In addition, networks may operate differently in urgent situations than in routine environments. Using content analysis to capture how networks respond to external environmental uncertainty can help better measure the performance of networks under stress. The relatively high number of articles on emergency management networks can be attributed partly to the availability of government emergency management plans and other government records, as well as the fast-growing research interest in this topic, especially after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Interlocal public service delivery and intergovernmental collaboration is another area where scholars applied content analysis to collect data. Scholars analyzed governmental service records such as interlocal service delivery reports, contract records, service catalogs, and joint service databases to examine intergovernmental and cross-sector collaborations in a wide variety of areas BIB007 BIB008 BIB011 . Andrew (2009) examined interlocal service delivery reports to collect information about contractual arrangements in law enforcement among 66 local governments in the Orlando-Kissimmee metropolitan area. He examined the contractual ties in various formats-service agreements, contracts and lease agreements, memoranda of understanding, mutual-aid agreements, and informal letters of agreement. He analyzed the patterns of contractual arrangements over five time periods from 1986 to 2003. BIB008 analyzed interlocal government agreements among the 44 local governments of Wayne County, in Michigan, in system maintenance functions (e.g., road and bridge construction and repair) and four lifestyle services (e.g., economic development and public safety). In this study the existence of interlocal government agreements was considered as a network tie between local governments. Similarly, Ponomariov, Kingsley, and Boardman (2011) examined the contract records of a transportation agency and analyzed the contracting relationships among a state transportation agency, contractors, and subcontractors in engineering design services between 1992 and 2003. These three articles by BIB007 , BIB008 , and BIB011 each collected longitudinal network data about interorganizational collaborations. Scholars used other organizational documents such as organizational reports or directories to draw network data on organizational engagement in interorganizational collaborations. For instance, Akkerma, Torenvlied, and Schalk (2011) examined the written reports and meeting minutes of colleges to identify the presence of collaborations, formal meetings, strategic alliances, and joint projects among five Danish colleges. BIB013 examined organizational databases, publications, and records to investigate organizational involvement in public health cooperation on the United States-Mexico border.  examined the directory of 173 nonprofit organizations in Oaxaca, Mexico, to identify the nonprofits' connections with government authorities and other nongovernmental organizations and the impact of party politics on the nonprofit organizations' network connections. This study did not specify the types of interactions that nonprofit organizations have with others. Scholars have analyzed documents to examine the interlocking ties among organizations. BIB004 examined the annual reports of 217 Swiss companies to understand the interlocking directorships. BIB014 researched interlocking boards between nonprofit and private organizations in Perth, Australia, by examining the websites of nonprofit organizations and companies. To examine Danish mayors' affiliations with professional organizations,  examined professional journals and other sources "including municipality associations, the political parties, municipality homepages, ministries, local media, article databases, and directories of business information" (p. 585). Policy is another important domain where researchers used documents to generate network data. BIB001 identified the key policy actors in Germany during the economic reform between 1990 and 1994 by examining newspaper articles and other publications. BIB015 examined official documents (not specified) to understand the preferences of the actors involved in the formation of Swiss climate policies. BIB016 analyzed the websites of the Federal Election Commission and other documents to examine donation behaviors and voting patterns among congressional representatives. Compared with research on interorganizational collaboration, the research on policy networks is limited. Variety of network data drawn from documents. Through content analyses of documents, researchers can draw various kinds of network data and pull both one-mode network data as well as two-mode network data. One-mode data refers to those datasets that include relational data for the same set of actors, whereas two-mode data involve two different sets of actors. As Table 3 shows, the majority of the 18 articles I analyzed focused on one-mode network data, whereas only seven articles collected two-mode data. Although the types of network data are diverse, the study of interorganizational collaboration is the focus of many studies. In eleven of the 18 articles the researchers presented interorganizational collaboration data in a wide range of management and policy domains. Researchers examined the existence of collaboration ties and organizational involvement in collaborative efforts. The examination of documents allowed researchers to study interorganizational collaborations in different formats, ranging from formal contractual relations to informal collaboration agreements, strategic alliances, and joint projects BIB017 BIB007 . There are fewer studies on the formation and development of policy networks, which may be partially explained by the unavailability of appropriate policy documents and the challenge of coding policy documents. Selecting the appropriate documents might not be easy, as researchers need to justify the selection of particular policy documents instead Table 3 An Analysis of Data Drawn from the Documents (Continued ) of others. Furthermore, unlike emergency management plans and interlocal government service agreements, thorough content analysis of documents related to the formation of policy networks may be more complicated. The policy documents can include a large number of policy stakeholders and involve intricate interactions among policy actors, which may require a labor-intensive coding process in order to draw useful network data. Longitudinal network data. Compared with survey methods and qualitative interviews, content analysis of documents has strengths in producing longitudinal network data at a reasonable cost, which allows for the examination of the changes in network ties. In Table 4 the strengths and weaknesses of content analysis and survey methods are compared. Collecting longitudinal network data through surveys and interviews can be expensive and time consuming. During a survey study or an interview, respondents may face challenges recalling the history of an event or a collaborative experience. Moreover, it might be difficult to ensure the participation of the same participants in a longitudinal survey or interview study BIB012 . In contrast, researchers can take advantage of archival data and pull network data for needed time periods. Researchers have collected longitudinal network ties among organizations by examining organizational documents for certain periods of time (e.g., BIB007 BIB008 BIB011 . For instance, by examining the interlocal service delivery agreements or reports, researchers can pull interlocal collaboration data from each time period and merge the data into panel network data BIB007 . Although seven of the 18 articles considered here collected longitudinal data, most of these articles aggregated the data at different points of time, and only few conducted network analysis to examine the change of network ties. Qualitative and quantitative analysis. Data drawn from documents can be analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative analysis methods. The data allow researchers to conduct statistical network analysis. The data can also provide rich contextual information and the meaning and content of the relational data captured in the documents  , though the data are not directly reported by the network participants. Researchers can apply descriptive network measures such as degree centrality and network density to identify the key actors and examine the network structural characteristics  • Easy to access and cost less  . • Longitudinal data  • Draw social media data BIB018 • Large-scale datasets, and whole-networks BIB012 • Easy to analyze BIB012 • Standard process and easy to be implemented BIB012 • Address a variety of network questions (such as intensity of collaborations) in an efficient manner Weakness • Subjective coding process  • Generalizability issues  • Concern about response rates • Lack of contexts BIB012 • Attrition for longitudinal study (e.g., BIB010 . Researchers can also apply sophisticated statistical models such as actor-oriented models and quadratic assignment procedure regression to understand the collaboration patterns among local governments in public safety (e.g., BIB007 BIB008 . Using qualitative analysis methods, researchers can focus on describing the context, the meaning of network ties, and the process of network formation. For instance, after reviewing newspaper articles and other documents, BIB001 described the Germany economic reform between 1990 and 1994 and explained the involvement of key policy actors in great detail. Or, researchers can combine both a quantitative analysis approach with a qualitative approach to analyze network data to provide a quantitative description of the actors and the network as well as detailed contextual background information. Most of the existing research has focused more on converting data to numerical forms for quantitative analysis and could take better advantage of qualitative data by providing more contextual information and by interpreting the content or meaning of network ties, as Table 4 suggests.