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This dissertation contributes to our understanding of how people build and use social capital – resources embedded in social relations – in organizational settings. Whereas the extant literature has tended to focus on the structure of interpersonal networks within organizations and the link to various indicators of individual attainment, this dissertation instead uncovers the dynamics of network action. I tackle two central questions: (1) During times of organizational change, how do organizational actors use the social resources accessible to them by virtue of their position in the structure? and (2) What organizational interventions can help people forge valuable new connections in the workplace? Core to this investigation is the concept of social capital activation – that is, the conversion of latent social ties into active relationships. Three empirical studies illuminate different facets of social capital activation during commonly experienced forms of organizational change: (1) an organizational restructuring; (2) large-scale transformations that create individual-level threat or opportunity; and (3) the introduction of a novel employee cross-training program. Because organizational change is often accompanied by significant shifts in resources and power, network activation choices in these periods can have significant consequences for individual attainment and organizational performance. I draw on unique data from three disparate settings – a global information services firm; a large health care organization; and a software development lab based in Beijing, China. Multiple research methods, including a large panel data set of archived electronic communications, qualitative interviews, experimental studies conducted with samples of working professionals, and a longitudinal field experiment, are used to identify how organizational actors marshal social resources through individual-level network activation choices. Findings from these studies contribute to research on: (1) organizational social capital; (2) the structural dynamics of organizational change; (3) ascriptive inequality in organizations; (4) cognition and social networks; and (5) workplace practices and network change.

In this thesis, the phenomenon of intercategorial polysemy is approached from two related but previously unconnected perspectives, namely that of linguistic creativity and mental representation. It is argued that the creativity that is part and parcel of the linguistic abilities of each and every human being, has been neglected in the study of linguistics, and should, in fact, form the basis of studies such as these in cognitive lexical creativity. It is argued that structural productivity (the generative view of linguistic creativity) and conceptual creativity lie on a continuum, the middle ground of which is covered by phenomena which are both productive and creative and which have both a formal and a semantic aspect to them. One such a phenomenon is intercategorial polysemy. Explaining the way in which speakers of a language such as English can systematically and productively produce and interpret words that belong to more than one syntactic category (for example, hammerN - hammerV, tableN - tableV, skyN - skyV), which may range from the conventionalised to the completely innovative, has long been a problem for linguists. Traditional morphological accounts involving theoretical notions such as zero derivation have always been found to be inadequate, mostly because zero derivation does not account for the variation in meaning and the background knowledge that is needed to produce and interpret novel instances. The main problem addressed in this thesis then is the question as to the nature of the lexical knowledge of speakers and its mental representation, so that it can form the basis for the cognitive processes that will enable language users to be linguistically creative. Various theoretical models that have been proposed to account for intercategorial polysemy, namely the representationalderivational model, the network-activation model, as well as the theory of conceptual integration (also called blending), are presented and evaluated in the light of a representative sample of completely novel instances of intercategorial polysemy. / Linguistics / D. Litt. et Phi. (Linguistics)

In this thesis, the phenomenon of intercategorial polysemy is approached from two related but previously unconnected perspectives, namely that of linguistic creativity and mental representation. It is argued that the creativity that is part and parcel of the linguistic abilities of each and every human being, has been neglected in the study of linguistics, and should, in fact, form the basis of studies such as these in cognitive lexical creativity. It is argued that structural productivity (the generative view of linguistic creativity) and conceptual creativity lie on a continuum, the middle ground of which is covered by phenomena which are both productive and creative and which have both a formal and a semantic aspect to them. One such a phenomenon is intercategorial polysemy. Explaining the way in which speakers of a language such as English can systematically and productively produce and interpret words that belong to more than one syntactic category (for example, hammerN - hammerV, tableN - tableV, skyN - skyV), which may range from the conventionalised to the completely innovative, has long been a problem for linguists. Traditional morphological accounts involving theoretical notions such as zero derivation have always been found to be inadequate, mostly because zero derivation does not account for the variation in meaning and the background knowledge that is needed to produce and interpret novel instances. The main problem addressed in this thesis then is the question as to the nature of the lexical knowledge of speakers and its mental representation, so that it can form the basis for the cognitive processes that will enable language users to be linguistically creative. Various theoretical models that have been proposed to account for intercategorial polysemy, namely the representationalderivational model, the network-activation model, as well as the theory of conceptual integration (also called blending), are presented and evaluated in the light of a representative sample of completely novel instances of intercategorial polysemy. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D. Litt. et Phi. (Linguistics)