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ItemSocial capital and research productivity of foreign-born scientists in the United States(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2017-01-17) Berzins, KasparsProfessional social capital of foreign-born scientists and its implications for their scientific performance is researched. The theoretical framework is based on the network theory of social capital and the scientific and technical human capital model extending it with knowledge from the immigration literature pertaining to the differential social capital of immigrants. Major focus is on the network sizes, relational properties, and geographic locations of professional social capital of foreign- and US-born scientists. Netwise II survey data on 760 foreign-born and 963 US-born scientists are used and quantitative measures of scientists' social capital, demographic and professional attributes, and research outputs are constructed. Statistical comparison of means and multivariate regressions are used to verify the differences between populations and to test hypotheses. Results indicated significant differences between professional social capitals of foreign- and US-born scientists suggesting insufficient social integration. Potential mechanisms for mitigating the social capital shortages and role of foreign social capital are discussed. Implications for academic, immigration, and diaspora policies of the US and sending countries are provided.
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ItemPay for performance, position, or place:(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2016-07-29) Gehl, Sarah BethThis dissertation examines organizational influences on gender and racial salary equity among tenured and tenure-track faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The study argues that traditional individual and disciplinary explanations for salary inequities fail to capture the institutional variations in conditions among women and underrepresented minority faculty in STEM disciplines. A better understanding of these institutional variations is important for theory and practice as scholars continue to attempt to explain the unexplained salary gaps and policymakers target organizational change to resolve persistent gaps. The results show that individual characteristics and discipline do explain salary gaps among STEM faculty broadly; however, those results vary across organizational settings. Comparisons of gender and racial salary gaps among institutional types show that organizational mission, resources, and power influence the extent of salary parity. The results validate the importance of emphasizing and rethinking institutional categorizations to understand pay disparities among women and underrepresented minority STEM faculty.
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ItemInterdisciplinarity among academic scientists: individual and organizational factors(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014-03-25) Xiao, FangInterdisciplinarity among Academic Scientists: Individual and Organizational Factors Fang Xiao 139 Pages Directed by Dr. Julia E. Melkers Drawing on a wide variety of social science theories, this study investigates the effects of tenure system, university climate for interdisciplinary research (IDR), gender, and industry experience on academic scientists’ engagement in IDR in different disciplines. Using survey and bibliometric data, two dependent variables are generated to measure production aspects of IDR: the self-reported percentage of IDR papers which is from researchers’ own estimate of their IDR papers responding to one survey question, and the calculated percentage of IDR papers which is a combination of two bibliometric indicators of scientists’ borrowing and boundary crossing activities. Results find that our conventional wisdom about the effects of some individual and organizational factors on scientists’ propensity to engage in IDR is outdated, and their effects depend on the disciplinary contexts. These findings suggest science policy makers, funding agencies and university administrators to keep fresh and informed about scientists’ research activities and underlying context and take full into account of distinct characteristics of different disciplines when they make or reform policies to encourage IDR work.
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ItemCollaboration patterns and patenting in nanotechnology: exploring gender distinctions(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013-05-08) Meng, YuDrawing upon the research on gender in science (especially gender and publication and patent productivity), social network studies, and social studies of interdisciplinary research and nanotechnology, this dissertation develops and tests a series of hypotheses to advance the understanding of the gender difference in patenting in the U.S. Ridgeways theory of gender frame (Ridgeway, 2009, 2007; Ridgeway&England, 2004) is very powerful in explaining gender inequity at both micro- and macro-levels, and thus constitutes the foundation of this study. After laying out the theoretical foundation, I set out to focus on collaboration as one of critical mechanisms accounting for the gender difference in patenting. While social network scholars maintain that social capital resides in network structure and claim different structures provide different benefits (Borgatti, Jones,&Everett, 1998), I conceive of diversity as the most important structural feature of collaboration networks to predict patenting performance, and accordingly develop the concept boundary-spanning collaboration to refer to collaboration networks containing relationships to diverse others. Then, I rely on social studies of gender, network, and desired outcomes as well as research on interdisciplinary fields in general and nanotechnology in particular to propose several hypotheses regarding how gender would differ on boundary-spanning collaboration and how the differences matter the gender gap in patenting in the context of nanotechnology. Two sets of analyses, performed on large-scale patent data and individual-level survey data, generate novel and important findings. These results enhance our understanding of the distinct context of nanotechnology, especially with regard to collaboration and gender representation, and the interrelationships of gender, boundary-spanning collaboration, and patenting involvement in this context. In brief, there are three major findings. First, while nanotechnology and patenting activities present new areas for gendered studies in science, the influential gender stereotypes always predict the detection of a gender gap. Second, collaboration networks, especially those featured with diversity, are relevant to the gender gap in patenting nanotechnology in a complicated way, but the operationalization of diversity is the key to comprehend the complexity. Third, the returns from collaborative relationships are generally gendered, but the gender gap in returns varies upon the context where a relationship takes place. Relating these findings to previous research, I highlight the theoretical and methodological contributions of this study, point out its limitations for future research development, and draw pertinent policy implications.
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ItemThe prevalence and productivity effects of close friendship in academic science(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013-04-09) Kiopa, AgritaThis dissertation examines the prevalence of friendship and its effects on productivity in academic science from the perspective of networked social capital. It seeks to understand what friendship is in the context of the professional environment, what distinguishes it from other professional relationships, and how it affects the function and the outcomes of science. The study was motivated by the increased emphasis of collaboration as a means of fostering research competitiveness. The research reported here was performed as part of the National Science Foundation project "NETWISE I: Women in Science and Engineering: Network Access, Participation, and Career Outcomes" (Grant # REC-0529642). The importance of friendship in the context of academic science has often been implied and anecdotal, but it has not been elucidated or empirically tested. This dissertation seeks to address this gap. The unit of analysis in the model is the individual. The dissertation conceptualizes friendship as one aspect of a collaborative relationship and thus an important determinant of a scientist's social capability of pool relevant resources for the purposes of productivity. It hypothesizes that professional and personal roles form an integrative relationship within collaborative ties and that such complementarity benefits individual goal attainment, specifically with regard to publication productivity. The results of the study show that friendship has a strong positive effect on an individual's publication productivity, which is comparable to the effect of collaboration across organizational boundaries. The results also show that while friendship is fairly prevalent in collaborative relationships, some groups of scientists are more likely to have friends among their closest collaborators than other groups; that friendships differ from other collaborative relationships in that they more often form between individuals of the same status, provide a greater variety of productivity-relevant resources such as knowledge, advice, endorsements of one's reputation, and introductions to potential collaborators; and that friendship facilitates the mobilization of these resources from personal collaborative networks for productivity purposes.