An activity‐based theory of communication networks in organizations, applied to the case of a local church

Abstract

This article applies Feld's (1981) focus theory to build the argument that the activities of a local church are organized by a latent hierarchy of activation. Because communication occurs in the context of practices that attend these activities, hypotheses about the number and kinds of links in members' personal networks are advanced. Stochastic analysis based on Lazarsfeld's (1950) latent distance model was applied to data on members' participation in church activities. It showed that the activities could indeed be represented by a single latent hierarchy of activation. Correlation analyses largely supported the remaining hypotheses about the relationship between activation and personal network characteristics. These findings encourage extension of an activity‐based approach in organizational communication research and suggest an alternative three‐dimensional image of organizational communication networks.

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