Explaining Inter-Organizational Network Formation

Abstract

Abstract In recent years, we have witnessed remarkable growth in various forms of co-operation among organizations. There has been a considerable increase in inter-organizational alliances during the 1980s, particularly in high-technology industries (Haagedoorn 1993; 1995; Hergert and Morris 1988; Mowery 1988). Within the US biotechnology industry, for example, firms without any formal co-operative ties to other firms have become increasingly rare, while the connectivity of firms within the industry has increased significantly (Powell et al. 1996). In the hospital systems software industry, inter-firm co-operation was unusual up until 1970, increased slightly in the 1970s, but showed significant growth in the 1980s and 1990s (Mitchell and Singh 1996). A similar pattern can be detected for the car industry. According to Helper (1991), beginning in the 1980s US car manufacturers have been reducing their degree of vertical integration and have increasingly relied on longer-term contracts with a limited number of tightly linked sup¬ pliers. Many European car companies also adopted this strategy at around the same time (Altmann and Sauer 1989; Morris and Imrie 1991; Turnbull et al. 1989). In other industries inter-organizational co-operation has been a more long-standing practice. In construction, for example, consortia and enduring sub-contracting relationships are well-entrenched forms of organizing large projects (Eccles 1981). In the US film industry, after World War II, the major studios progressively outsourced production of feature films while retaining finance and distribution (Robins 1993); therefore, for some time now, persistent patterns of contracting are related less to formal organizations such as the studios, but crystallize out of relatively stable networks of producers, directors, cinematographers, actors, and musicians (Faulkner and Anderson 1987). Regional industrial districts in the Italian textile and clothing (Brusco 1982; Lazerson 1988, 1993; Mariotti and Cainarca 1986), German metals (Grabher 1993b; Sabel 1989; Herrigel 1993), or US electronics industries (Saxenian 1994) represent other often-mentioned examples of long-standing patterns of co-operative inter-organizational relations, as do Japanese Keiretsu (Gerlach 1992) and Korean Chaebol (Steers et al. 1989).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 149 citations exist upstream.