Our work starts from the belief that a network perspective do have a distinctive role in strategic and organizational research. By adopting an Embeddedness perspective (Granovetter, 1985; and Uzzi, 1997), we believe that idiosyncratic patterns of relationships produce opportunities and constraints that result in outcomes unpredicted by standard strategic explanations.
In reviewing the literature we have encountered much evidence supporting the view that capability-building is a complex processes socially embedded in intra-firm, inter-firm and individual relationships.
On the one hand, there are evidences on the importance of internal social networks. Thus, the absorptive capacity seen as the ability to recognize the value of new resources and knowledge (capacity that lies at the basis of organization learning and innovation), does not reside in any single individual, but it is dependent on the link across a mosaic of individual capabilities (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990).
On the same wavelength seems to be Spender when he admits that firms cannot be abstracted from the social context in which they are embedded and the process of knowledge management is incomprehensible if considered apart from the collective practices that give it social meaning (Spender, 1996). In this background is grounded his concept of ‘collective knowledge’, a kind of knowledge comparable to culture, a background practice, a common good for the activity system that it holds together. This knowledge may be inaccessible to the single individual but can be activated by collective interaction (Spender, 1996).
Moreover, the claim that firms act as social communities for the creation of organizational capabilities and the transferring of knowledge (Zander and Kogut, 1995) seems another strand in the same direction. By claiming that firms—like social communities—use their relational structures, processes and shared codes to transfer and create new skills and capabilities, Zander and Kogut provide a vision of competitive advantage as socially structured. Knowledge and capabilities are embedded in the organizing of social relations and new learning is a process of combinative capabilities, meant as an intersection of the capability of the firm (Kogut and Zander, 1992).
On the other hand, there is a large amount of studies which explains differences in firm’s competitive capabilities by viewing economic action as embedded in firm’s network of ties. From this perspective, inter-firm ties are seen as relations stipulated to access essential resources and capabilities (Gulati and Gargiulo, 1999). Social ties play an important role in the formation and in the strategic success of these relations to the extent to which they allow resources combination in unique ways (Kogut et al., 1992; Larson, 1992; Ring and Van de Ven, 1992; Gulati, 1995a, 1995b and 1998; Doz, 1996; Uzzi, 1996 and 1997; Dyer and Singh, 1998; Gulati and Gargiulo, 1999; and McEvily and Zaheer, 1999). This vision suggests that firm’s critical resources and capabilities may span firm’s boundaries through social linkages. As a result, it is by firms’ collaborations that derives a relational rent defined as “a supernormal profit jointly generated in an exchange relationship that cannot be generated by either firm in isolation and can only be created through the joint idiosyncratic contributions of the specific alliance partners” (Dyer and Singh, 1998, p. 662).
It follows that the embedded patterns of linkages may account for differences in competitive capabilities across firms: the idiosyncratic and unique manner in which firms are embedded in networks can be an important source of firm’s heterogeneity. This causes a shift from traditional Strategic Management perspectives on competitive advantage that preclude the evaluation of a firm’s competitive advantage in a networked environment. What is more,
an Embeddedness interpretation of resource-based problems provides a more contextualized vision of competition as socially structured.
However, network studies in strategy and organization do not imply a formal or unitary ‘theory’ that specifies laws, propositions, or correlations, but rather a loose federation of approaches for investigating relationships. Thus, there is an internal diversity of network approaches and important disagreements over the very definition of its fundamental concepts Since we are interested in the strategic and organizational implications of a network perspective, we aim at classifying the consequences which have been attributed to network dimensions in the literature. In order to classify such a literature in a systematic way, we adopt content analysis, in conjunction with multiple correspondence analysis and cluster analysis on scientific articles. In fact, one of the most revealing ways to determine the foci of the body of knowledge and realize what we know in this field is to examine what scholars publish.
As stated by Van Doren and Heit (1973) “academic journals mirror the direction of a discipline’s research” (p. 67).
The paper is therefore organized as follows. The next section describes the methodology in terms of research question, design, sampling and data analysis. Following section presents the results of the analysis identifying the classificatory principles used to cross-classify network studies and to provide a typology of network research. Finally, discussions about such results are drawn.
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