As expected, functional interdependencies at work and good relations among one's colleagues have a positive influence on one's own informal ties to colleagues. Conditions that make a person more attractive as a social resource, like having a higher education or a shared future, also enhance informal relations between co-workers. Women in spite that they seem to have a choice to be worker or a 'homemaker', do not have fewer or less good relations at work. Finally, in contrast to Marxist ideas good relations with the boss are associated with good relations to co-workers. T. Snijders Abstract Lindenberg's relational signaling theory is used to develop hypotheses on the link between relationship strength, network embeddedness, organizational context and social escalation of conflicts in organizations.
Social escalation is defined as the incorporation of one or more third parties into a conflict.
An empirical test is conducted with data on 67 conflicts between 22 managers, gathered during three years of ethnographic fieldwork and a longitudinal network study in a management team of a German Paper Factory. Multilevel analysis indicates that strong ties between conflicting parties decrease the level of social escalation, but this effect becomes weaker over time. Network embeddedness increases the chances for social escalation between unrelated conflict parties only at later stages of the conflict. The results highlight the importance of organizational contexts as a key determinant of escalation processes. In this article, we describe a research program about the causes and consequences of divorce in the Netherlands from the 1950s to the 1990s.