Resumen de Organizations as social cognitive systems

Juan Antonio Candiani

• This Thesis focuses on how organizations deal with complex knowledge by articulating the collaboration of their members. Three chapters address different aspects of this idea. The first examines the use of social networks for observing knowledge recombination and its implications for the innovation literature. The second chapter analyzes how knowledge of different levels of similarity can be combined throughout different types of social configurations. Specifically, multidisciplinary and redundant structures are operationalized and assessed in terms of different cognitive abilities needed for innovating. Finally, the last chapter uses innovations as a natural test for capturing the cognitive capacity of organizations for dealing with complex knowledge. This capacity is then related to how organizations decompose their knowledge bases into simpler structures.