Ideas, in Motion: Twenty-five Years of Rethinking Relations and Knowledge at the COI

The Center on Organizational Innovation (COI) at Columbia University celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, and this essay reviews this quarter of a century of conceptual and methodological innovations at COI in the area of networks, communication, and knowledge. The content of these concepts has changed markedly, partly due to advances within interdisciplinary encounters, and partly due to fundamental changes in underlying social phenomena. COI scholars strived to understand such novel phenomena by methodological innovation with conceptual richness, engaging with temptations to adopt simplistic and atavistic imageries of sociation and agency in interdisciplinary fields. The fields of network science, knowledge networks, and online communications are three areas where COI research brought novel insights, that challenged dominant perspectives, marrying an ethnographer’s mindset with a broad range of quantitative methods. In addition to reviewing COI research achievements, I also outline key contemporary empirical puzzles, where perspectives from COI remain relevant and fruitful.