Measuring mediation and separation brokerage orientations: A further step toward studying the social network brokerage process

Brokerage has assumed an increasingly important role in social network research and organizing more generally. Social network research has traditionally defined brokerage in structural terms as a broker who stands between two disconnected parties. Alongside this structural definition, network research has generally made assumptions about, but rarely measured, the brokerage processes engaged when individuals inhabit such network positions. More recent work argues for explicitly addressing brokerage behavior, principally in the form of three brokerage action orientations that focus on distinct brokerage action: joining network contacts (or tertius iungens), mediating between network contacts, and separating network contacts. We advance this emerging research stream by developing measures of the mediation and separation brokerage orientations. These two measures, alongside the pre-established tertius iungens measure (Obstfeld, 2005), present the opportunity to study the role of multiple brokerage orientation...