Trust and cooperation are at the heart of the two most important approaches to comparative politics - rational choice and political culture. Yet we know little about trust's relationship to political ...institutions. This book sets out a rationalist theory of how institutions - and in particular informal institutions - can affect trust without reducing it to fully determine expectations. It then shows how this theory can be applied to comparative political economy, and in particular to explaining inter-firm cooperation in industrial districts, geographical areas of intense small firm collaboration. The book compares trust and cooperation in two prominent districts in the literature, one in Emilia Romagna, Italy, and the other in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It also sets out and applies a theory of how national informal institutions may change as a result of changes in global markets, and shows how similar mechanisms may explain persistent distrust too among Sicilian Mafiosi.
In light of the rapid changes in the business environment and the increased intensity of competition, it is difficult for companies to maintain their market position and the sustainability of their ...business. Therefore, all these changes affect companies as the competition in the past was between the company and another company. However, the way of competition in our world today has changed in a way that a group of companies competes with another group of companies. Hence, the current study aims to address strategic alliances as an entry point in achieving entrepreneurial success, as one of the modern and important topics in the business world resulting from rapid developments and global openness based on transcending geographical boundaries in today's world. The impact of the dimensions of strategic alliances in achieving the pioneering success of commercial companies were investigated. The research field includes commercial companies in the Dohuk governorate in the Kurdistan region. The research sample was selected from managers in senior management and middle management for a number of companies, which amounted to (60) individuals for data collection purposes. Data analysis was performed for the field side using the statistical software (SPSS V26). The results of the research revealed that strategic alliances have a role in achieving entrepreneurial success and recommended the need to pay attention to the types of alliances that would enhance entrepreneurship in commercial companies.
Although social, political, technological and business networks hold our modern world together, we still lack a good understanding of what business networks are, how they work, and the language of ...network analysis that we may apply to solve common, everyday problems. This book looks at such questions as: How do we make sense of the business networks we participate in and the networks we observe from a distance? Are business networks distinct from social networks, and if so what distinguishes them? How can business network analysis from a multidisciplinary perspective enhance strategic management? Emanuela Todeva deftly explores the patterns of networking and the dynamics of network relationships, to show how we can begin to tap their full potential. Of great interest to students and scholars of business network analysis, this revealing volume will also prove informative for managers wishing to obtain insights into network dynamics and its implications for strategic decision making. Business Networks expertly provides an interdisciplinary overview. It skilfully engages the reader with a range of economic, sociological, strategic management and communication theories that contribute to our knowledge of networks and networking. Transcending specific disciplines, and synthesizing the contributions that shape the structural, relational and cultural approaches to network analysis, Todeva's outstanding text offers a wealth of conceptual frameworks and an exhaustive typology of existing business networks.
Organizational ambidexterity refers to the capability of businesses to balance the pursuit of radical innovation simultaneously with incremental innovation. It echoes the popular notion that to ...thrive well in a competitive economy, businesses need to balance their exploration of new markets and products with exploitation or balance operational efficiency with flexibility. Digital technologies have become central to enabling organizational ambidexterity. The analysis reveals how the three dimensions of digitization efforts—IT implementation spending, IT training, and actual IT usage—should be combined with specific internal and external factors to develop greater ambidexterity. Two of these complementary factors are either a centralized organizational structure or a strong supplier and partner network—the first a likely channel for cross-organizational knowledge transfer and the second for interfirm knowledge transfers. However, determining which combinations are useful also depends on the size of the business and competitiveness of markets. Large businesses, or those in more competitive sectors, derive a slightly greater advantage from digitization than small firms or those in less competitive sectors. These findings are useful for policy makers tasked with subsidy allocation to industry sectors and managers when allocating investment spending for digitization.
Due to digitization, new mechanisms have emerged for achieving organizational ambidexterity, defined as the ability to pursue both efficiency and flexibility while balancing exploitation and exploration. This study investigates the role of digitization in achieving organizational structural ambidexterity by undertaking both exploitation and exploration simultaneously. Given the complex interdependencies between digitization and multiple intrafirm and interfirm factors in practice, this study adopts a configurational theory perspective. We posit that ambidexterity is better explained as an outcome of aligning digitization with several intrafirm and interfirm factors, rather than of any individual factors in isolation. We empirically derive configurations for achieving ambidexterity by applying fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to 1,325 Canadian firms that invested in new information technology system implementation. The results reveal the mechanisms in which digitization plays a multifaceted role in achieving ambidexterity. Notably, the mechanisms differ among
intrafirm-oriented configurations
and
interfirm strategic alliance configurations,
and among
large firms
and
small firms.
In the intrafirm solution, digitization and centralization are essential for achieving ambidexterity, with other factors being peripheral; however, in the interfirm solution, digitization plays a peripheral, and even a counterproductive role, in achieving ambidexterity. Particularly, intrafirm collaboration is a necessary condition in both the intrafirm and interfirm solutions for achieving ambidexterity. Interestingly, the results also suggest that small firms seeking ambidexterity require a high level of digitization only while pursuing an intrafirm (but not for an interfirm) solution, whereas large firms require a high level of digitization for both intrafirm and interfirm solutions. New insights and implications for theory and practice for achieving organizational ambidexterity with digitization are discussed.
"We are in the midst of rapid change in how firms organize themselves and their work. There are numerous popular accounts of this evolution but few theoretically grounded and research based ...assessments. Into this gap steps David Knoke. Changing Organizations is an invaluable resource for all concerned with organizational restructuring and will be an essential reference and starting point for scholars and practitioners who want a serious account of what has occurred and what is likely to happen next."
Peter Osterman Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"In this book, Changing Organizations, David Knoke shows how a social network approach can unify topics as diverse as corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, national innovation systems, workplace struggles, and corporate informed explanation of why corporations have become so powerful in American society. For graduate students in organization studies courses and MBAs, the book's many extended case examples will provide a valuable context for classroom discussions. The book is packed with informative figures and charts, as well as a helpful appendix on network analysis, and thus will prove valuable as a reference book, as well."
Howard E. Aldrich University of North Carolina
In Changing Organizations David Knoke examines the formation of intra- and inter-organizational networks and their impact on the fates of employees, companies, and communities. He explores how the network perspective—when used in conjunction with ecology, insitutionalism, power and resource dependence, transaction cost economics, organizational learning, and evolutionary theories—contributes to a more comprehensive explanation of organizational transformations. Written in an accessible narrative style for advanced undergraduate students in sociology, public policy, and business management courses, it draws heavily from contemporary cases to illustrate key concepts. Knoke also offers readers a careful exposition of basic structural and network concepts and principles.
This text is well suited for courses in sociology of organizations, business organizations/management, and public policy/administration.
The purpose of the research was to investigate whether the comp5anies involved in strategic business alliances (henceforth referred to as the SBA) have a higher level of open innovation and better ...business results in the metal industry in the EU country, namely Slovenia. The survey was carried out in 115 companies, where the aforementioned relations and their influence were studied applying appropriate statistical methods (e.g. the Mann-Whitney Test, Chi-Square statistics, t-test, etc.). The sample encompassed four clusters and R&D centres from metalprocessing industry. The results showed that SBA have a significantly strong impact on companies' open innovation as well as more efficient cooperation with universities and research institutions. Among the companies involved in SBA, the portion of innovations generated in cooperation with their business partners accounted for 57.7%, while those, not involved in SBA, the same indicator amounts to 19%. In addition, the results showed that the majority of business results, in companies involved in SBA, were above average, compared to the industry sector average values. The value added per employee within companies involved in the SBA was significantly higher than the industry average, as well as the profits; difference was more than threefold. It may be concluded that SBA represent an important bridge in the transformation from a closed innovation model to a model of open innovation, resulting in better business performance. Important implication for companies is related to the message that cooperation with competitors may bring value added to all companies involved.
We investigate how geographic distance influences which firms engage each other in research and development (R&D) collaborations. Given advances in technology, geographic distance might not be ...expected to affect who partners with whom, yet recent research has reported on the localization of exchanges in numerous market settings. We identify factors that shape the degree to which geographic distance matters to alliance formation by considering the heterogeneity in adverse selection risk across exchange partners. Specifically, we argue that the effects of geographic distance depend on the extent to which partners are able to evaluate each others’ resources and prospects. Empirical evidence from R&D collaborations in the semiconductor industry indicates that the likelihood of alliance formation is negatively related to geographic distance, even within clusters. The extent to which alliance formation falls off with geographic distance is diminished when the firms have prior ties, operate in the same product market, or possess similar technological knowledge.
This paper explores the interplay between social structure and economic action by examining some of the evolutionary dynamics of an emergent network that coalesces into a small-world system. The ...study highlights the small-world system's evolutionary dynamics at both the macro level of the network and the micro level of an individual actor. This dual analytical lens helps establish that, in competitive and information-intensive settings, a small-world system could be a highly dynamic structure that follows an inverted U-shaped evolutionary pattern, wherein an increase in the small-worldliness of the system is followed by its later decline as a result of three factors: (1) the recursive relationship between the evolving social structure and individual actors' formation of bridging ties, which eventually homogenizes the information space and decreases actors' propensity to form bridging ties, creating a globally separated network; (2) self-containment of the small-world network, or increasing homogenization of the social system, which makes the small world less accepting of and less attractive to new actors, thereby limiting formation of bridging ties to outside clusters; and (3) fragmentation of the small-world network, or the small-world system's inability to retain current clusters. The study uses data on interorganizational tie formation in the global computer industry in the period from 1996 to 2005 to test the hypothesized relationships.
Management researchers emphasize the prevalence and importance of firms’ strategic alliance portfolios in determining various firm outcomes. We extend this literature by empirically testing how two ...aspects of alliance portfolio partner diversity (industry and organizational type diversity) affect both the level and reliability of firm performance. Using the multiplicative heteroscedasticity estimation technique on a sample of 178 of the largest multinational firms in the automobile and telecommunications industries across the twenty-year time period (1995 to 2014), we demonstrate that firms with greater partner industry diversity in their strategic alliance portfolios enjoy greater performance coupled with greater reliability of performance. In contrast, firms with greater partner organizational type diversity in their strategic alliance portfolios have lower performance coupled with lower reliability of performance.
Research linking interorganizational networks to innovation has focused on spanning structural boundaries as a means of knowledge recombination. Increasingly, firms also partner across institutional ...boundaries (countries, industries, technologies) in their search for new knowledge. When both structural and institutional separation affect knowledge recombination, aggregate characterizations of ego network attributes mask distinct recombination processes that lead to distinct types of innovation outcomes. We address this issue by focusing on triads as the locus of recombination in networks. We partition firms’ networks into three configurations of open triads—foreign, domestic, and mixed—based on the distribution of the broker and its partners across or within institutional boundaries. We argue that each configuration embodies distinct recombination processes, with foreign triads offering high access to novel knowledge, domestic triads facilitating relatively efficient knowledge integration, and mixed triads balancing the two. We apply this approach to a global research and development alliance network in the biotechnology industry, using countries as institutional boundaries. The results show that domestic triads affect innovation volume (i.e., the productivity of innovation) more strongly than mixed or foreign triads. In contrast, foreign triads have a greater impact on innovation radicalness (i.e., the path-breaking nature of the innovation) than mixed or domestic triads. The findings suggest that different brokerage configurations embody unique recombination processes, leading to distinct innovation outcomes. Our research provides a deeper understanding of how networks and institutions jointly influence distinct aspects of innovation.
The e-companion is available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1165
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