Communication Networks from the Enron Email Corpus “It's Always About the People. Enron is no Different”

By Jana Diesner, Terrill L. Frantz, Kathleen M. Carley. Computational and mathematical organization theory, 2005

306 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Enron email corpus is appealing to researchers because it represents a rich temporal record of internal communication within a large, real-world organization facing a severe and survival-threatening crisis. We describe how we enhanced the original corpus database and present findings from our investigation undertaken with a social network analytic perspective. We explore the dynamics of the structure and properties of the organizational communication network, as well as the characteristics and patterns of communicative behavior of the employees from different organizational levels. We found that during the crisis period, communication among employees became more diverse with respect to established contacts and formal roles. Also during the crisis period, previously disconnected employees began to engage in mutual communication, so that interpersonal communication was intensified and spread through the network, bypassing formal chains of communication. The findings of this study provide valuable insight into a real-world organizational crisis, which may be further used for validating or developing theories and dynamic models of organizational crises; thereby leading to a better understanding of the underlying causes of, and response to, organization failure.

Subfields: Communication, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/12ae9727807804e05421bbd05da2c1c858c59937

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Communication

1. Stella Biderman
2. Leo Gao
3. Kieran Bicheno
4. Huan Liu

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. Huan Liu
2. Lei Tang
3. Bryan Perozzi
4. Stella Biderman
5. Leo Gao
6. Kieran Bicheno
7. Charu C. Aggarwal
8. Jun Zhu

Citations in the corpus

• Community Detection and Mining in Social Media (2010, background): “Examples include email communication networks (Diesner et al., 2005), instant messaging networks (Leskovec and Horvitz, 2008), mobile call networks (Nanavati et al.”
• Datasheet for the Pile (2022, methodology): “Enron Emails: The Enron Emails have been used extensively, including by [Diesner et al., 2005, Kossinets et al., 2008, Tang et al., 2008, Crammer et al., 2009, Madjarov et al., 2012].”