Bridging in Network Organisations the Case of International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

Abstract

In this paper, we investigated the relational architecture of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change focussing on the individuals that, in the thirty years of existence of the IPCC, have assured the connection between the different temporal, thematic and functional divisions of the organisation. To identify these bridge individuals, we proposed a new measure of bipartite bridgeness defined as the summation of the inverse Jaccard similarity coefficient of the neighbourhoods of all pairs of divisions to which an individual has participated. As we illustrated using an original database of the eight thousand individuals who contributed to the IPCC since its foundation, this measure of bipartite bridgeness is more informative than the simple degree, as it takes into account the importance and the rareness of the connections assured by each bridge.

Keywords: bridging, bipartite networks, International Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, complex organisations