Predicting organizational recruitment using a hybrid cellular model: new directions in Blau space analysis
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Predicting organizational recruitment using a hybrid cellular model: new directions in Blau space analysis Nicolas L. Harder1 · Matthew E. Brashears1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Ecological models are useful in modeling organizations and their competition over resources. However, the traditional approaches, particularly Blau space models, are restrictive in their dependence on a continuous space. In addition, these models are susceptible to indicating competition in sparsely populated areas of an ecology, resulting in competition being indicated where there are no resources to compete over. To deal with these problems we reconceptualize Blau space into the Hybrid Blau space model, using both a cellular structure to model a wider number of variable types, and probabilistic urn models to simulate competition between organizations. We briefly review the basic concepts of Blau space, demonstrate the issues with traditional Blau space modeling, present a new model referred to as the Hybrid model, and propose several new metrics to describe the behavior of organizations in this new model. A novel data source, attribute data from Parliament Members of the Ukrainian Parliament, are used to illustrate the Hybrid Blau space model. Keywords Simulation · Ecological models · Blau space · Recruitment · Competition
1 Introduction Ecological models from biology have often been adapted in social science to simulate competition and influence in social settings, particularly among social organizations (Hannan and Freeman 1977; McPherson 1983), as well as to test explanations for the behavior of individuals with similar demographics (Dellaposta et al. 2015) or health outcomes (Sallis et al. 2015). These models are popular for drawing inferences about data from the population level, often using measurement of independent and dependent variables at the same time point with the assumption that these measures are proxies for latent variables.
* Nicolas L. Harder [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA
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N. L. Harder, M. E. Brashears
One popular method of ecological modeling in Sociology is Blau space, which models competition between organizations for resources, particularly members, in a k-dimensional space (McPherson 1983). This k-dimensional space is constructed from sociodemographics, or variables that are salient and socially relevant to the probability of association, such as age, income, and occupational prestige (McPherson 1983; McPherson and Ranger-Moore 1991). Blau space has been used as an instantiation of the more general affiliational ecology model to measure and predict competition between voluntary organizations (McPherson and Ranger-Moore 1991), to understand the time demands of these organizations and their influence on recruitment during day and evening time cycles (Shi et al. 2017), and to predict the spread of behaviors between organizational members and individuals within
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