Diffusion of a Professional Social Network: Business School Graduates in Focus

Online professional social networks are becoming an instrumental tool to facilitate relationships between business and technology professionals for career success. Even though tools such as LinkedIn can be used to manage human capital for career success use and adoption still is not universally accepted. This paper seeks to better understand the effect university, gender, and degree type has on the diffusion of an online social network (LinkedIn) across three years (2011 to 2014). The authors’ findings show diffusion is not consistent across business school graduates. Their business school findings suggest that university, gender, and degree type have significant associations with LinkedIn participation. This is the case even though the majority of graduates still have yet to join the LinkedIn social network. An analysis of the results and future research directions are presented. Diffusion of a Professional Social Network: Business School Graduates in Focus