Approach to the social structure on health and swine production research at Colombia

Abstract

The industrial expansion of the global livestock systems has generated productivity increases, but also systemic contradictions. This have brings unprecedented challenges for the technical-scientific social structures which are in charge of its management.

Objective. Characterize the swine health and production research system organizational patterns at Colombia in order to detect its dynamics and vulnerabilities.

Design/methodology/approach:

It was used social network analysis to analyze the associative matching in a prominent swine health and production research community at Colombia considering scientific research generated between 2010 and 2018.

Results: The swine research network at Colombia has a conjunctural growth, an incipient behavior and is highly centralized, delimiting it´s research narrative and generating a normal distribution in the network transitivity.

Limitations on study/implications: The sample was selected by convenience and bounded for a number of scientific papers, so it would be necessary to expand the sample and the timeline too. Visualizing and measuring this social structure could make possible manage risks and opportunities to the swine production sector.

Findings/conclusions: The obtained values of social density and structural centrality values expose an organizational model that replicates the global production model: reduced information flows and partially connected structures, highly centralized and with minor variability in its information channels and knowledge exchange in a highly strategic sector.