Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon (2009), Social networks

Links play a twofold role on the web: they open the channels through which users access information, and they determine the centrality of sites and their visibility. This paper adds two factors to the analysis of links that aim to draw a parallel between the web and other offline interorganisational networks: the resources that the organisations publishing online are able to mobilise, and the status or public recognition of those organisations. Exponential random graph models (ERGMs) are used to analyse a sample of the web of about one thousand sites, showing that both the economic resources of the producers of the sites (a proxy to their wider pool of resources) and their presence in traditional news media (a proxy to their status) significantly increase their probability of receiving more links, and therefore, their centrality. This adds a sociologically relevant dimension to the analysis of the web that has been disregarded so far but that is crucial to understand the way it distributes visibility.

Srikanth Paruchuri (2009)Organization science, Published online before print January 22, 2009.

This paper proposes that a mechanism through which a firm’s location in the interorganizational network influences the firm’s internal innovation activities is modifying the amount of information flowing within the firm. Exploring a firm’s internal innovation activities, I hypothesized that structural centrality of an inventor in the intrafirm co-inventing network is associated with her impact on her firm’s innovation activities in an inverted-U-shape relation. I further hypothesized that this relationship is moderated by the firm’s centrality and span of structural holes in the interfirm network. I found strong support for these hypotheses in a longitudinal study of eight large pharmaceutical firms. The findings in this paper, apart from having managerial implications, have implications for research on alliances, network studies, and innovation processes.

Andrew V. Shipilov (2009), Organization Science, January-February 2009; 20: 85 – 106.

This study investigates characteristics that affect the relationship between firms’ positions in a network of collaborative ties with other firms and their performance. Firms located in similarly structured networks rich in structural holes may obtain different performance results depending on their (1) capacity to absorb heterogeneous information, (2) ability to protect against partner noncooperation, and (3) bargaining power. In this paper, I argue that firms with a wide scope of experience have superior absorptive capacity for dealing with heterogeneous information; hence, such firms will be able to extract performance improvements from network positions rich in structural holes. Furthermore, firms with a high level of historic multimarket contact (MMC) with their partners are able to reduce the risks of partner noncooperation, hence augmenting their performance compared to firms in open networks that do not enjoy MMC with their own partners. Finally, firms of low centrality in the industry’s network of alliances will extract performance benefits from enhancing bargaining power as a result of exploiting brokerage opportunities in open networks. These arguments are corroborated in a study of relationships formed among investment banks’ advising on the merger and acquisition transactions in the United Kingdom between 1992 and 2001.