Social structure and competition in interfirm networks : the paradox of embeddedness
By: UZZI, Brian
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ArticlePublisher: Ithaca : Johnson Graduate School of Management, March 1997Administrative Science Quarterly 42, 1, p. 35-67Abstract: The purpose of this work is to develop a systematic understanding of embeddedness and organization networks. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at 23 entrepreneurial firm, I identify the components of embedded relationship and explicate the devices by which embeddedness shapes organizational and economic outcomes. The findings suggest that embeddedness is a logic of exchange that promotes economies of time, integrative agreements, Pareto improvements in allocative efficiency, and complex adaptation. These positive effects rise up to threshold, however, after which embeddedness can derail economic performance by making firms vulnerable to exogenous shocks or insulating them from information that exists beyond their network. A framwork is proposed that explains how these properties vary with the quality of social ties, the structure of the organization network, and an organization's structural position in the network
The purpose of this work is to develop a systematic understanding of embeddedness and organization networks. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at 23 entrepreneurial firm, I identify the components of embedded relationship and explicate the devices by which embeddedness shapes organizational and economic outcomes. The findings suggest that embeddedness is a logic of exchange that promotes economies of time, integrative agreements, Pareto improvements in allocative efficiency, and complex adaptation. These positive effects rise up to threshold, however, after which embeddedness can derail economic performance by making firms vulnerable to exogenous shocks or insulating them from information that exists beyond their network. A framwork is proposed that explains how these properties vary with the quality of social ties, the structure of the organization network, and an organization's structural position in the network
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