Unpacking Novelty: The Anatomy of Brokers' "Vision Advantage"

Abstract

The Strength of Weak Ties (SoWT) and Brokerage Theory (BT) rely on the argument that brokers access novel information through weak bridging ties. Yet our conceptualization of novelty is itself fundamentally underdeveloped. We therefore develop a theory of how three distinct types of novelty \textemdash diversity, non-redundancy and uniqueness \textemdash combine with network structure to create vision advantages. We test this theory using panel data on an evolving corporate email network in a medium-sized digital media firm over twelve months. Three main results emerge from our analysis. First, we confirm the Diversity-Bandwidth Tradeoff (DBT) at the heart of the vision advantage. As brokers' networks become more diverse, their channel bandwidth contracts, creating countervailing effects on access to novel information. Second, we uncover a mechanism driving the DBT, which helps explain differences in vision advantages across strong and weak ties. Strong cohesive ties deliver greater information diversity and non-redundancy, while weak bridging ties contribute the greatest uniqueness (the information that is most different from what other contacts deliver). Third, we find network diversity (in contrast to network constraint) is positively associated with longitudinal entropy, a measure of the accumulation of novel information over time. This suggests that weak bridging ties, which provide the most unique information through low bandwidth, structurally diverse channels, contribute the most to one's aggregation of novel information over time. Taken together, these results help resolve two long standing debates in network theory about whether strong cohesive networks or weak bridging networks contribute more to vision advantages. This work establishes firmly that it depends.

Keywords: Information worker productivity, Networks, Information Exchange, Information Channels, Information Flow, Knowledge Transfer, Content Analysis.