Dynamic organizations. How to measure evolution and change in organizations by analyzing email communication networks

Since organizations are dynamic systems, they change over time. Communication within organizations represents these changes. The use of social network analysis is an established (although still not common) approach to better understanding organizational structures. Methods and business applications for dynamic analyses are still a new, though promising field. The increasing use of computer mediated communication, like email, provides particularly relevant data for studying organizations. Focusing exclusively on the changes in the use of email communication over time, two different methodological approaches are used to analyze the email data stream: descriptive network visualizations and a new model using exponential random graph models for event stream data. In a simulation with 97 students, a merger of two different organizations was replicated.