This book provides a grounded theory of the collegial form of organization. It is based on a network analysis of a traditional and successful Northeastern US corporate law firm in which partners -- rational and calculating actors if there ever were any -- locked themselves in a cooperative and long-term situation without much hierarchy and formal power differences to enforce their agreements.

For many years Emmanuel Lazega has explored communication behavior and decision-making processes of small workgroups within larger organizations. To account for the knowledge claims of members of those groups, and for the ways in which such claims are legitimated collectively and translated into action, he presents a theory of the interactive elaboration of information on which decisions are based.

This volume provides new insights into the functioning of organizational, managerial and market societies. Multilevel analysis and social network analysis are described and the authors show how they can be combined in developing the theory, methods and empirical applications of the social sciences. This book maps out the development of multilevel reasoning and shows how it can explain behavior, through two different ways of contextualizing it. First, by identifying levels of influence on behavior and different aggregations of actors and behavior, and complex interactions between context and...