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Web edition: June 3, 2011
Print edition: July 2, 2011; Vol.180 #1 (p. 9)
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Political thrillers that portray a “web of corruption” get it all wrong, at least according to an analysis of e-mails between Enron employees. The flow of the famously corrupt corporation’s electronic missives suggests that dirty dealings tend to transpire through a sparse, hub-and-spoke network rather than a highly connected web.
Employees who were engaged in both legitimate and shady projects at the company conveyed information much differently when their dealings were illicit, organizational theorist Brandy Aven of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh reported June 1 at an MIT workshop on social networks. The distinction is visible in the network of e-mails among employees, which takes the shape of a central hub and isolated spokes when content is corrupt, rather than a highly connected net of exchanges.
While today Enron is associated with corporate fraud, for years the energy and commodities company was a Wall Street darling. Fortune magazine named Enron America’s most innovative company for six consecutive years ending in 2000. But by the next year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating the firm’s dealings.
“They were not only innovative technologically and administratively, but also in their accounting practices,” said Aven.
Aven’s analysis compared communications regarding three legitimate innovative projects and three corrupt ones that went by the names JEDI, Chewco and Talon. Communications regarding the shady deals took on a hub-and-spoke shape, a setup that maximizes secrecy and control. A small, relatively informed clique occupies the hub at the center, communicating with protruding spokes that don’t share ties with each other. The hub gets information from the spokes, which in their isolation are less likely to whistle-blow and can be played off each other.
Recognizing that content alters flow is crucial, said Ramakrishna Akella, an expert in information management from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Much of network modeling relies on statistics and algorithms that too often ignore content, he said. “Mining content is very insightful,” said Akella. The sudden appearance of new words or acronyms, for example, can signal the emergence of innovations.
That the sneaky behavior employed to cover the corrupt “innovations” at Enron might have been revealed just by diagramming who is e-mailing whom suggests that the structures of social networks might be a good diagnostic tool. Probing the shapes of social networks might help investigators identify electronic dens of intrigue, such as people communicating within a terrorist network, said Aven.
And the work suggests that networks aren’t just static conduits for information.
“It’s intriguing,” said Aven. “We’ve treated social networks as contained plumbing systems directing the flow of information, but we should think about them as water that carves river beds of social relations.”
Aven’s analysis revealed that, on average, employees sent roughly five e-mails about legitimate projects for every one about those that were corrupt. Transitivity — the tendency of two people who know the same person to also know each other — also dropped markedly in the network of corrupt communications. And reciprocity — back-and-forth rather than one-way communication — plummeted.
Citations
B. Aven. The effects of corruption on organizational networks and individual behavior. MIT workshop: Information and Decision in Social Networks, Cambridge, Mass, June 1, 2011.
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A political organization says that it is renouncing terrorism and is embracing political process. How can the international community quantify that?
Organized crime claims that they are legitimate businessmen engaged in legal activities. Does their social network resemble that of a legitimate business?
That said, the big question is just: "So what?" It's interesting that post hoc analysis has shown this pattern but raises a questions for the future: Does the pattern for all illicit networks look like the one found, or are there others? Are there legitimate networks that show the same pattern? And most significant, to what extent would society condone mining of "insightful" content *in advance* to detect both emergence of innovations and emergence of threats? Let's hope the precogs engaged in that work have a conscience.
The images used to represent the networks are not obvious and possibly misleading. The hub and spoke image uses different radii for the well-connected hub vs. the poorly connected spokes, so I assume that is the rule for illustration. However, to the degree I am able to see the interconnections of the nodes on the right diagram, I can't see such a relationship. All the nodes seem to be at the same distance, while a few nodes have single connections, others a few, and I could not resolve nodes any with many, though an artist's rendition should be given latitude. However, all the radii seem to be about the same. This is following a different rule of illustration than the left diagram. One following the radius rule would be more cloud-like but would have some spokes and some sort of nucleus. The decreasing available volume toward the center for well-connected nodes(angular or spherical geometry something or other, I can't think of the name for this) would exaggerate the apparent concentration of well-connected nodes for this kind of illustration and under-represent the less-connected nodes. I get the point from the text, but the illustration is not convincing as it seems to not be a fair illustration of relative connectivity.
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