Works
- Being in the Right Place: A Structural Analysis of Individual Influence in an Organization, Administrative Science Quarterly, 1984
- Network Analysis in the Social Sciences, Science (with Stephen P. Borgatti, Ajay Mehra, and Giuseppe Labianca), 2009
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
Structural sources of influence. In a study of 140 nonsupervisory employees of a newspaper publisher, Brass found that people's positions in the workflow, communication, and friendship networks, including their centrality and their access to and control over others, were related to how influential colleagues judged them to be and to later promotions.
What it explains
Brass explains why where a person sits in the flow of work matters for influence, apart from title: those through whom work and information must pass are seen as influential and tend to advance.
Tactics that draw on Daniel J. Brass (1)
In Thinking Tools
Known for
A scholar of social networks in organizations and coauthor of a widely cited review in Science of network analysis, the study of the ties between people and of how a person's position among those ties shapes what happens to them.