| Understanding the organizational history of the children's television community is the key to understanding why children's television has evolved in the way it has. In order to discern the mechanisms through which this community has coevolved, this dissertation employs and expands upon theoretical and methodological work in the organizational communication and organizational change literatures. As a result, this dissertation is a response to four recently mentioned opportunities in organizational literatures—the need to understand organizational evolution from the level of the community (e.g., Aldrich, 1999; Astley, 1985; Baum, 1996; Carroll & Hannan, 1999; DiMaggio, 1994; Ruef, 2000); the need to more systematically understand the complex relationships within the community (Baum, 1996); the need to incorporate network analysis in the study of community ecology (DiMaggio, 1994); and the need to move network analysis toward a multitheoretical and multilevel (MTML) framework for investigation (Monge & Contractor, 2003). This dissertation draws on these four opportunities to create an integrated theoretical framework to study the evolution of organizational communities through network analysis, and uses the children's television community to test this framework. In addition, a stage model of community evolution is proposed.; Through the triangulation of three forms of data (interviews, network analysis questionnaires, and historical records), a set of over-time networks is created identifying the relationships between the eight populations within the children's television community. These networks are then used to test the community evolution stage model and several hypotheses regarding the change in the community communication network over-time. Analysis yielded partial support for both the stage model and the hypotheses. |
