Abstract (EN)

Since Granovetter’s (1985) and White’s (1981, 1992) work about the interactions between economics and social relations, economic sociologists have shown that it is important to know the social structure of a specific milieu to understand its economic structure. In order to explore the complex interactions between these embedded spheres, we provide a multilevel reading (individual and organizational) of an economic market by modelling its underlying social ‘meta-system’. We reconstruct a multilevel network (in the sense of Lazega & al. 2007, 2008) in an economic market. We consider two levels of action: the first is measured by an advice network between individual actors; the second is measured by a contract network between the organizations in which the individuals belong. The issue is to model the global structure as generating by these two levels of agency that are partially nested. To investigate this meta-system, we use the formalization of Wang, Robins, Pattison and Lazega (2012) developed for multilevel ERGMs. Here the data combines oriented (level one) and non-oriented (level two) networks. We use the multilevel ERGM because we assume that there is a feedback between the inter-individual social relations and the inter-organizational economic relations (structural vertical dependence hypothesis between the levels). A traditional ERGM at each level shows differences in structuration and temporality between the levels. To manage this diachrony, organizations develop specific mechanisms of learning and knowledge transmission (represented here by affiliation links). At the same time, recent contracts and current inter-organizational negotiations constitute a specific context for the inter-individual relations (inter-organizational links). We show that the cross-level effects and especially the multilevel tetradic substructure (Lazega, Jourda, Mounier and Lazega. 2011, Brailly and Lazega 2011) are helpful to investigate the articulation of this meta-system.