Authors with many theoretical and managerial perspectives argue that businesses commercializing technologically complex goods benefit when they collaborate closely with other businesses. Collaboration is viewed as a means for businesses to overcome competency limitations and to achieve the close configuration of components required for complex goods. We predict that collaborative relationships ofen assist businesses to produce complex goods, but that the relationships might also cause problems for the collaborating businesses. We find that firms using development-oriented and marketing-oriented collaborative relationships in the hospital sofhvare systems industry are less likely to shut down than businesses that follow independent approaches when the environment changes gradually, but businesses using collaborative relationships are sometimes susceptible to being acquired by other firms. Following a sudden environmental shock, businesses with collaborative relationships for activities central to the shock became more likely to shut down, while businesses with collaborative relationships for activities outside the focus of the shock became more likely to survive. The study critically evaluates and tests the widely stated but little-tested argument that interfirm collaboration is usually beneficial. The results address the issue of whether organizational choices affect comparative business performance. This paper investigates the survival of businesses that use collaborative relationships with other firms to commercialize complex goods. A growing literature has identified many benefits of interfirm collaboration. Several recent studies argue that businesses that collaborate closely with other organizations in order to develop and market complex goods will be more successful than businesses that operate independently (Jorde and

Businesses often benefit by forming alliances with other firms but risk becoming dependent on their partners. We discuss two situations in which dependence may create serious problems: first. if a partner shuts down and. second. if a partner forms a relationship with a new partner. We examine collaborative relationships fo rmed by businesses operating in the U.S. hospital software systems industry during the 1961-91 period. We find that businesses faced increased risk of dissolution if they did not form new partnerships after partners shut down or formed collaborative relationships with new pa rtners. The results have implications for del-eloping an evolutionary theory of business strategy and performance. Our approach implies that the performance of a focal business often depends 011 how the strategies of its business partners evolve over time. An evolutionary theory of strategy must incorporate key characteristics of actions and relationships throughout a web of business partnerships. The dual nature of interfirm relationships. which both help a business survive at one time and inhibit its ability to adapt at another. helps explain why so many successful businesses fail when their environments change. Formal interfirm collaboration has become an important means by wh ich busine sses in many industries gain access to capabilities needed to compete in changing markets. Empirical research suggests that collaborating firms sometimes realize corporate financial benefits (Berg, Duncan,

Data on Silicon Valley law firms over a 50-year period were used to study the genealogy of organizational populations and its consequences for organizational life chances when a member of an existing firm leaves to found a new firm. Hypotheses and subsequent analysis suggest that the transfer of resources and routines between a parent organization and its progeny decreases life chances for the parent firm and increases life chances for the progeny. The results are contingent on the founder’s previous position in the parent firm and time since the parenting event. Moreover, I find that progeny have lower life chances when the parent is a failing firm, when there are multiple parents, and when the founder is a former senior partner of a large law firm. • 1 Organizational sociologists have long considered the effects of the transfer of resources and routines from old to new organizations. The 1980s featured a relatively brief but active line of research that attempted to establish a framework for understanding new organizations as the progeny of parent organizations. Brittain and Freeman (1980) examined factors that lead organizational members to leave and start new organizations. Other scholars, such as McKelvey

of dynamic capabilities

This paper considers processes of organizational imprinting in a sample of 100 young, high technology companies. It examines the effects of a pair of initial conditions: the founders ' models of the employment relation and their business strategies. Our analyses indicate that these two features were well aligned when the firms were founded. However, the alignment has deteriorated over time, due to changes in the distribution of employment models. In particular, the 'star 1 model and 'commitment 1 model are less stable than the 'engineering ' model and the factory ' model. Despite their instability, these two blueprints for the employment relation have strong effects in shaping the early evolution of these firms. In particular, firms that embark with these models have significantly higher rates of replacing the founder chief executive with a non-founder as well as higher rates of completing an initial public stock offering. Some implications of these findings for future studies of imprinting and inertia in organizations are discussed. I N 1. Imprinting, Inertia and Organizational Change I How much do origins matter for organizations? This question has pivotal „ importance for understanding organizational change. Despite its theoretical I importance, little effort has been directed at gaining evidence that speaks $ • directly to it. This paper takes a first step in an effort to rectify this gap in | our knowledge. It reports some early results from an effort to examine prou cesses of imprinting in a sample of young, high technology companies. 1 Current theory and research on organizations and industries reflect two Jjj polar views on the importance of origins. One perspective holds that organ-•I izational structures reflect mainly current internal and external exigencies:

: This study addresses the following questions: (1) can organizations learn how to manage infrequent and heterogeneous tasks ? (2) If they can, then what are the mechanisms that might explain learning under these circumstances ?, and (3) what are the limitations under which these mechanisms operate ? A model based on explicit knowledge codification and tacit experience accumulation is submitted and tested using data from a sample of 183 acquisitions in the US banking industry. Measures of post-acquisition integration strategies and of preacquisition resource characteristics are included in the model. We find that tacit knowledge accumulation significantly impacts performance when the experiences are highly homogeneous, and that knowledge codification improves acquisition performance in the context of high post-acquisition integration, i.e. when the organizational challenge is particularly complex. Also, the level of integration between the two firms involved in the acquisition positive...

This article presents a formal reconstruction of James D. Thompson’s classic contribution to organization theory, Organizations in Action. The reconstruction explicates the underlying argumentation structure for Thompson’s propositions—literally, theorems or problems to be demonstrated. This allows Thompson’s propositions to be derived as theorems in a deductive theory. As it turns out, the formal theory is based on general assumptions using only few primitive concepts. In addition, this theory explains why Thompson’s propositions do not hold for noncomplex or “atomic ” organizations (a restriction on the domain of application). Furthermore, this study reveals that organizations attempt to reduce constraints in their environment—a heretofore unknown implication of the theory.

The recent revitalization of the American labor movement presents a paradox for social movement scholars. Long seen as exemplifying the conservative goal and tactical transformation associated with Michels’s iron law of oligarchy, few would expect organized labor to embrace radical goals and tactics. Yet some local unions have done just that. This article addresses the question of how social movement organizations are able to break out of bureaucratic conservatism. In-depth interviews with union organizers and other data are used to identify the sources of radical transformation in labor organizations by comparing local unions that have substantially altered their goals and tactics with those that have changed little. This analysis highlights three factors: the occurrence of a political crisis in the local leading to new leadership, the presence of leaders with activist experience outside the labor movement who interpret the decline of labor’s power as a mandate to change, and the influence of the international union in favor of innovation. The article concludes by drawing out the theoretical implications of the finding that bureaucratic conservatism can sometimes be overcome in mature social movements.

validation, and data management. Thanks to Wenpin Tsai and three anonymous reviewers whose input significantly improved this article. 1

: In a study of post-acquisition management practices in the U.S. commercial banking industry, we examine how firms codify their knowledge from previous acquisition experiences and routinize their post-acquisition decisions. We find that firms with higher levels of knowledge codification tend to integrate their acquired units more and to replace the existing top management team with higher probability. Also, acquirers tend to replicate their integration and resource replacement decisions irrespective of variations in the resource characteristics of their targets, suggesting strong tacit routinization effects. 3 Corporate acquisitions have been phenomena of considerable interest to scholars in strategic management, finance and economics for a long time. Despite the impressive amount of research devoted to the performance consequences of acquisitions, the strategic decisions adopted during the post-acquisition integration phase have received significantly less attention. As Haspeslagh...