How Can Computational Social Science Motivate the Development of Theo ries, Data, and Methods to Advance Our Understanding of Communication and Organizational Dynamics? Page 1 of 19 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Northwestern University; date: 23 March 2020 Print Publication Date: Feb 2020 Subject: Political Science, Political Behavior, Political Methodology Online Publication Date: Mar 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190460518.013.7 How Can Computational Social Science Motivate the Development of Theories, Data, and Methods to Ad vance Our Understanding of Communication and Orga nizational Dynamics? Noshir Contractor The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication Edited by Brooke Foucault Welles and Sandra González-Bailón Abstract and Keywords It is almost a decade since the article “Computational Social Science” was published in Science (Lazer et al., 2009). That article advocated for computational social science as a promising new arrow in the quiver for understanding and enabling social systems. The chapters in this section, and indeed in this book, are a testament to the decade-long tra jectory of this movement. The chapters in this section also provide an opportunity to re flect on how computational social science can motivate the development of theories, data, and methods to advance understanding of current and emerging forms of communication and organizational dynamics. This chapter reviews some of the progress made on these dimensions and points to chapters in the section that serve as exemplars. Keywords: computational social science, organizational dynamics, communication theory, social network theory, big data 1. Can Computational Social Science Motivate the Development of Theories of Communica tion and Organizational Dynamics? THE advancement of organizational dynamics and communication theory is the most im portant benchmark by which the long-term impact of a new intellectual approach is evalu ated here. In this section I outline four ways that computational social science is motivat ing developments that (1) test existing theories at scale; (2) extend existing theories to of fer more nuanced insights; (3) generate new theories about existing (p. 114) phenomena by the inclusion and juxtaposition of concepts for which data were either unavailable or