Digital technologies are increasingly permeating the way we work, live, and think. This summer school intends to equip students with a set of analysis techniques to understand the antecedents, effects and outcomes of this digital transformation better. The focus will be on social network analysis as a method to study the social and economic implications of digital technology from an empirical point of view. In particular, during two weeks, we encourage students to reflect on the impact of digital technologies on the way we work, may it be through participating in new modes of virtual work, may it be through new forms of crowdworked creativity, or participating in new forms of collaboration that combine elements of work and play. We will try to uncover and find managerial points of action for instance for the sharing economy, to the practice of social media marketing, to new forms of algorithmic management, to emerging business models in the digital economy, and to other new forms of working.

Our search for solutions will be underpinned by learning about social network methods. Social network analysis is interested in the relational properties of organizations and individuals. While the method has been developed in the pre-digital era for small-scale data, it is especially suited for user-generated trace data that contains relational elements. By using social network analysis, communities and sub-communities can be identified and clustered based on core attributes. Moreover, social network analysis is a key method to identify influentials or important and noteworthy elements in a network. Thus, social network analysis is a versatile and widely used method with many benefits, especially in times of big data and user-generated data from social and digital media. A solid foundation in social network analysis and adjacent methods will provide the students not only with a toolset to analyze communities effectively but also with a relational way of thinking through core concepts of the method.