Thanks to Matt Webb once again for digging out a forgotten gem in the shape of the First Monday paper It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know: Work in the Information Age, published in 2000.

This paper reports on ethnographic research in the workplace that looked at how people form their own social networks to support their work, and how these often have remarkably little in common with the organisational chart.

First Monday recently published another, shorter and more quantative study of online community formation and evolution in Stanford: A social network caught in the Web.