Implications for Strengthening Socio-Technical Collaboration in Wastewater Treatment: A Socio-Technical Network-Based Analysis

In the context of the persistent growth of wastewater scale, traditional management methods, which focus separately on social organization or technical processes, struggle to achieve seamless collaboration between social personnel and technical equipment. Plagued by issues such as low technical integration, unsmooth emergency instructions, and backward cross-departmental technical collaboration, wastewater treatment suffers from inefficiency. Adopting a socio-technical network perspective, this study aims to dissect the formation mechanism of the wastewater treatment network (WWTN) and explore how social personnel and technical equipment interact with each other. Based on the Multilayer Exponential Random Graph Models (MERGMs), 21 hypotheses from intra-layer and cross-layer structural effects, individual attribute effects, and exogenous dynamic effects are proposed and verified with a typical WWTN in Nanjing as an example. The results show that 10 formation mechanisms, including the intra-layer transfer effect and the cross-layer centrality effect, are verified. On this basis, specific management suggestions are put forward to improve the WWTN’s performance.