Studying the Co-evolution of Individual Actions and Emergent Social Structures using Digital Trace Data

The information systems field has a long-standing interest in how individual actions co-evolve with social structures. Yet, studying the exact process of co-evolution turned out to be elusive. We propose a novel way to study this co-evolution using digital trace data. By analyzing the sequence of individual actions through digital trace data and the process of emergent social structuring expressed in collective action patterns, we can measure the recursive influence of individual actions and the process of emergent social structuring over time. We illustrate our approach using data from GitHub. We analyze the social structuring expressed through collective action patterns of a project and compare them with the idiosyncratic action patterns of individual developers. Our research has implications for studies that examine the connection between social structures and individual actions. Our approach particularly allows us to investigate the role of power and social influence in structuration processes, which has been typically neglected in existing research.