Peter Monge

Affiliate Research Scientist

Professor Emeritus

Peter Monge is Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism and Professor of Management and Organization at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. He is also the Director of the Annenberg Networks Network, a research center focused on communication network theory and research. He is also an associated faculty with the Center for Effective Organizations in the Marshall School of Business.

His most recent book (with Noshir Contractor) is Theories of Communication Networks. He has also published Communicating and Organizing(with Vince Farace and Hamish Russell), Multivariate Techniques in Human Communication Research (with Joe Cappella), Policing Hawthorne(with Janet Fulk and Greg Patton) and Reasoning with Statistics (5^th ed, with Fred Williams). He has published theoretical and research articles on organizational communication networks, evolutionary and ecological theory, collaborative information systems, globalization, and research methods.

He is an Elected Fellow (2002) and a former president of the International Communication Association (1997-1998). He also served as editor of Communication Research from 1986 to 1993. He has received numerous awards including the Distinguished Scholar award from the Organizational Communication and Information Systems Division of the Academy of Management, the Research Award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association and the B. Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award from the International Communication Association. In 2008 he received the Distinguished Article Award in Communication and Social Cognition and in 2009 he received the Dennis Gouran Research Award for the Best Published Article in Group Communication. He has presented more than a dozen top three papers at conferences over the years. And, eight of his doctoral advisees have won dissertation of the year awards.

His research on organizational systems, communication networks, and evolutionary theory has been supported by a number of major funding agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Department of Energy, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Recent Research

Organizational Communication Networks

Peter Monge (USC) and Drew Margolin (USC) explain how communication and other social networks have been the subject of considerable scholarship since the eighteenth century (Mattelart, 2000), but the past two decades have produced unprecedented growth in network theorizing and research.

The Impact of Social Capital on the Development of Transactive Memories Multilevel Group Knowledge Systems

In this paper by Yu Connie Yuan (Cornell University), Peter Monge, and Janet Fulk, a multilevel, multi-theoretical model of transactive memory theory was developed by integrating the emergence model with social capital theories.

Resolving Communication Dilemmas in Database-Mediated Collaboration

Michael E. Kalman, Peter Monge, Janet Fulk, and Rebecca Heino discuss how in organizational settings, a communication dilemma exists whenever the interests of a collective (i.e., team, organization, interorganizational alliance) demand that people share privately held information but their individual interests instead motivate them to withhold it.

Fostering Intranet Knowledge-Sharing: An Integration of Transactive Memory and Public Goods Approaches

Andrea Hollingshead, Janet Fulk, and Peter Monge discuss how transactive memory theory is useful for predicting how organizational members use intranets to acquire, store and retrieve knowledge. Public Goods Theory is useful for predicting whom, how much, and when members will contribute and retrieve knowledge on intranets.

A Motivational Model for Resolving Social Dilemmas in Discretionary Databases

Michael E. Kalman, Janet Fulk, and Peter Monge discuss how organizations have increasingly become sites of collective action, where task performers rely upon shared databases as flexible means to collect and distribute information widely.