Organizations enter alliances with each other to access critical resources, but they rely on information from the network of prior alliances to determine with whom to cooperate. These new alliances modify the existing network, prompting an endogenous dynamic between organizational action and network structure that drives the emergence of interorganizational networks. Testing these ideas on alliances formed in three industries over nine years, the authors show that the probability of a new alliance between specific organizations increases with their interdependence, but also with their prior mutual alliances, common third parties, and joint centrality in the alliance network. The differentiation of the emerging network structure, however, mitigates the effect of interdependence and enhances the effect of joint centrality on new alliance formation. 3

We compare buyer-supplier links established by pairs of Japanese-owned automobile assemblers and component manufacturers operating in Japan and in North America during 198%90. Eight assemblers and more than I70 Japanese component manufacturers had established North American manufacturing facilities. In total, Japanese automobile assembly organizations operating in North America had recreated about a quarter of their Japanese supply links. The suppliers that set up North American facilities had recreated almost 60 percent of their links with traditional buyers and formed more than 16 percent of the possible extension links with new assembler partners. We identifi several economic and organizational factors that influence whether an existing buyer-supplier link will be recreated in a new location and whether firms that do not have a buyer-supplier relutionship at home will form an extension link in the new location. We find that the presence of a long-term buyer-supplier relationship, buyer and supplier entry timing to the new location, the joint venture status of the buyer, supplier size, and the breadth of a supplier’s sales base in the home market influence the likelihood that links will be recreated and extension links will be formed. Companies that set up business operations outside their domestic market often form supply links with home-country suppliers that also have established foreign facilities (Vernon, 1971; Grubel, 1977; Terpstra and Yu, 1988). The suppliers frequently make major contributions to the success of an assembler’s international facilities

R&D Management, 23 (2), April 1993. As the pace and breadth of technological progress increases around the world, companies both large and small are forming international collaborative arrangements as the basis for developing competitive advantage from technology. Management of these arrangements requires the creation and maintenance of a wide variety of strategic and operational interdependencies within and between companies. The paper introduces a method for developing a representation leading to a system level understanding of the coordination structure of international collaborative arrangements. The method is based on recent advances in coordination theory and object oriented domain analysis. We apply the method to represent four international collaborative arrangements. The representations that result are then used as data to identify five basic modules of the coordination structure of international collaborative arrangements: strategic management, intra-firm management, joint management, technology exchange and customer interaction. The proposed method leads to increased organizational learning of the goal oriented coordination processes for which managers are responsible when establishing international collaborative technology arrangements.

is to provide the reader with an understanding of the project’s main features, the issues to be addressed, the underlying theoretical reasoning, and the methods to be used. The paper should serve as a basis for discussion with other researchers. Any comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated I would like to thank Professor Hermann Simon for directing my research interests towards, the topic of closeness to the customer and for many helpful discussions that have had a significant impact on my work. Support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) is also acknowledged. This paper was written while I was a visiting scholar at ISBM. During this stay I gained a number of important insights on how a research project of this orientation and scope should be carried out. Special thanks are therefore due to ISBM’s directors Gary Lilien and David Wilson. 2 1.

Drawing on the concept of relational embeddedness and the associated mechanisms of mutual understanding, trust, and commitment, we examine how leaders ’ prior exchange experiences influence the likelihood of subsequent interorganizational exchange. We begin to develop a microlevel model of organization-level relations that accounts for nodal multiplexity. In data on baseball player trades, we found that individual leaders ’ ties affected exchanges less than did an organization’s other ties. The sharing of exchange experiences by organizations and their current leaders increased the influences of those experiences on exchange behavior. Thus, leaders have more influence within their organizational contexts than in isolation. For their helpful advice on this project, we thank

Information technology has been a central enabler in the process toward network society. Despite the critical role of computers in inter-organizational arrangements, coordination of IT decisions within these networks is a fairly unexplored area, both in research and in practice. The processes through which the orchestration of IT in networks takes place are largely hidden. In this paper we investigate the processes through which three public sector networks tried to reach collaborative agreements in the use and management of IT. We present some preliminary findings in the areas of management, vision, mission, and shared goals in the context of networks ’ IT governance.

this dissertation involves the development and refinement of a conceptual framework for describing and discussing crossfunctional co-operation and networking within product realisation processes. The conceptual framework, the analysis of the case study and a discussion of the implications and challenges for research and industrial sector are the main results of the dissertation

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"A multi-level perspective on the dissolution of business relationships" by

Theoretical work on international inter-university networks (IIN’s) is scarce. Research into the field of higher education itself has been dependent on theoretical frameworks from other disciplines, which then need to be adapted to the specific characteristics of higher education. In our search for starting-points for theory development we therefore need to relate to theoretical