Q1 2021 – 2022
Organizations and their environments
Organizations are:
Social entities;
Goal directed;
Designed as systems of activities that are consciously structured and coordinated;
Connected to the external environment.
Performance feedback is all about reflecting. How are we doing?
- Social aspiration level: performance this year per peer group (social comparison theory)
- Historical aspiration level: comparison performance from this year to previous year (learning
theory)
If the performance is below the aspiration → probability of change is high.
If the performance is above the aspiration → probability of change is low.
Analysis and knowledge about causal relationships between potential interventions and the outcome
is needed before intervening.
Service (dominant) logic: service (offering) only of value when used by customer (different from
product dominant logic).
The customer journey is visible via ‘touchpoints’. Who is involved in the service? For this, you need a
stakeholder network.
How to build your network? (Kilduff & Brass, 2010)
Social relations
Embeddedness
Structural patterning
Utility of network connections
Arms-length relationships versus relational exchanges
Extreme marketing approach: always search the cheapest suppliers.
Transaction Cost Economics: make, buy, ally decision based on uncertainty, frequency, asset
specificity.
o For example; relation between theatre school and a theatre close by.
Resource Dependence Theory: uncertainty increase → dependencies increase. Firms seek
relations to improve information exchanges, commitment, legitimacy, and exchange stability.
Based on the resource importance, control and alternatives.
o The more you are dependent on the resource, the longer and important the alliance.
The network approach; Criticism (Kildruff & Brass, 2010)
Where is the agency?
Self monitoring capacity, strategic choice
Cognition: accurate knowledge of third party ties
Boundary specification
Relations are dynamic
, Introduction to Interorganizational Networks
What do you need to start innovating: Research, Goals, Clear objectives, Resources.
Networks have three perspectives: social structure, perspective and empirical tool, a form of
governance.
Network as a social structure:
A network is a set of nodes and ties between those nodes. Ties for presence and absence relations!
The nodes can be everything.
In a social network analysis, you can look at types of ties to find interorganizational relationships:
Similarities
Social relations
Interactions
Flows
Interorganizational network: a group of at least three organizations that is connected through
various ties.
Networks as perspective and as an empirical tool:
With our network we can better understand social behaviour. It is focused on uncovering patterning
of people’s interaction.
It is also the study of social networks:
Relations are at least as important for social, political, organizational phenomena as
attributes.
Actors and their actions are interdependent rather than independent, autonomous units.
Individual’s positions determines opportunities and constrains.
There are different types of relational data:
- Relational content, relational form, relational strength
- Directed versus Undirected
- Symmetric versus Asymmetric
- Binary versus Valued
- Multiplex ties
Determining which actor is the most central in the network, can be done via various reasonings.
Network as a form of governance:
Governance is the use of institutions, structures of authority and even collaboration to allocate
resources and coordinate or control activity in society or the economy.
There are three broad ways in which governance occurs:
1. Top-down methods
2. Use of market mechanisms
3. Networks of collaborations
Discussing networks as the source of social capital.
Social capital: the advantage created by an actor’s location in a structure of relationships. It explains
how some actors gain more success in a particular setting through their superior connections to
actors. It is productive, relations, specific and least tangible.