Research Interests: The emergence (creation, maintenance, and dissolution) of communication and knowledge networks. Applications of complexity theory, chaos theory, and self-organizing systems theory to the study of organizing. Globalization and new forms of organizing. Computational modeling of organizational structures and processes. Advanced quantitative data analytic techniques including structural equation modeling, time series analysis, and network analysis.

Current Research: Professor Contractor's current research focuses on collaboration, including the role of computer-based tools to augment communication and knowledge networks in team and organizational settings. He is currently investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance and dissolution of dynamically linked knowledge networks in more than twenty organizations and communities. He is the Principal Investigator on a grant from the National Science Foundation's Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence Initiative titled “Co-evolution of knowledge networks and twenty-first century organizational forms: Computational modeling and empirical testing.” Previously, he was a co-Principal Investigator on the National Science Foundation's Project CITY (Civil Info-structure Technology), which examined communication, collaboration and coordination among individuals involved in civil infrastructure development and maintenance for a city.

For more information, see: http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/nosh/

Representative Recent Publications:

Monge, P. R., & Contractor, N. S. (in press). Emergence of communication networks. In L. Putnam & F. Jablin (Eds.) New handbook of organizational communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Available at http://www.spcomm.uiuc.edu/users/nosh/manuscripts/HOCNets.html

Contractor N., Zink, D., & Chan, M. (1998). IKNOW: A tool to assist and study the creation, maintenance, and dissolution of knowledge networks. In T. Ishida (Ed.), Community computing and support systems: Lecture notes in computer science 1519 (pp. 201-217). Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Available at http://www.tec.spcomm.uiuc.edu/nosh/kyoto.pdf

Heald, M., Contractor, N., Koehly, L. M., & Wasserman, S. (1998). Formal and emergent predictors of coworkers' perceptual congruence on an organization's social structure. Human Communication Research, 24, 536-563.

Contractor, N. S., Whitbred, R., Fonti, F., Hyatt, A., Jones, P., & O'Keefe, B. (1998, July). Self-organizing communication networks in organizations. Validation of a computational model using exogenous and endogenous theoretical mechanisms. Paper presented at the meeting of the International Communication Association, Jerusalem, Israel. Available at http://www.spcomm.uiuc.edu/users/nosh/manuscripts/Comp/comp.htm

Hyatt, A., Contractor, N., & Jones, P. M. (1997). Computational organizational network modeling: Strategies and an example. Computational and Mathematical Organizational Theory, 4, 285-300.