Employing Scale-Free Network to Explain the Success of Political and Business Figures

• Main Authors: Ying-Chun Pan, 潘盈君
• Other Authors: Ching-Pu Chiao
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/32637624578556861796

碩士 === 國立雲林科技大學 === 應用外語系碩士班 === 101 === The study is aimed to use the concepts of topology to explain the success of two political and business figures, the current US president Barack Obama and the former CEO of GE Jack Welch. The researcher singled out the minor and major incidents of their lives and used the concepts of scale-free networks to connect these dots. Minor points can be considered as nodes that connected few events and major points can be seen as hubs connected with many events. These data of these points, or events, were extracted from books, magazines, newspapers, videos and the information from the Internet. All of these data was processed based on grounded theory. Every event of the researched figures was listed on a memo card chronologically. The researcher then paired memo cards to examine their reciprocal relationships. If two events were related in a cause-and-effect way, they were graphically recorded and considered connected. This process was iterated with each pair of nodes until no further connections were found. The final result was a network, with some nodes connected much more than the others. These more connected nodes were called hubs which set the life directions of our research targets. These hubs placed important positive influences on the life of the research targets. The result indicated that these hubs, or decisions, were not necessarily made by their own; sometimes these events were laid on them by accidents or from other contingent factors. The finding showed that, in our cases, there were two tracks to reach the top: promoted from within or selected from outside. In order to succeed on the first track, gaining supports from important persons within the organization was the key. These persons would set the hubs of one’s successful career. Nevertheless, to reach the top of one’s career from outside the system, gaining favors from the public was the key. The events that raised the attention from the public became the hubs that set the foundation of one’s career. The force of the public would bypass the system and sent one to the zenith of an organization.