Wednesday 21 August 2013 – 10:30 am to 12:00 noon
at the QUT Gardens Point Campus
Presented by Joris Knoben
Radboud University Nijmege, The Netherlands
Embeddedness, network strategy or partner characteristics: Three alternative information sources for partner selection decisions
The large body of literature dealing with inter-organizational collaboration has advanced three different perspectives to understand and explain partner selection decisions. According to the ‘social capital’ view in the literature, organizations rely on prospective partner information that they obtain by being embedded in a network structure. Two other perspectives are the network strategy perspective, where organizations rely on their map of the network structure, and non-network information based on specific partner characteristics (i.e. ‘nodal attributes’). In this study, we simultaneously consider and compare these three different sources of information for partner selection decisions. More specifically, our objective is to determine to what extent organizations rely on each source of information and in how far there is a differential effect of each source of information on an organization’s partner selection decision. We test our hypotheses based on data of two whole networks in the health care industry in the Netherlands. Our findings show that the three sources of information are in some cases complementary, whereas in other cases they are competing while being conflated at the same time. For example, what appears to be a network embeddedness effect on partner selection decisions, are in some cases sometimes by-products of partner selection decisions based on nodal attributes. All in all, we develop a more comprehensive and profound understanding of partner selection decision than has been advanced thus far. Implications for the literature and managers are discussed.
Joris Knoben (1981) is an Associate Professor of Regional Economics and Networks with the department of Economics at Radboud University Nijmegen. He was trained as an economist at Tilburg University, and received his PhD-degree from the same university in 2007 from the department of Organisation Studies. From 2007 to 2009 he worked as a policy researcher for the Netherlands Institute for Spatial Research. He returned to academia as an Assistant Professor at Tilburg University in 2010 and joined the Radboud University Nijmegen in 2013.
His research and teaching primarily focus on the influence of the (geographical) environment of firms on their behavior and performance. Among others he has studied: 1) the antecedents and consequences of relocation decisions, 2) the effects of geographical proximity on interfirm collaboration, 3) the relationship between agglomeration, localized networks and innovative performance, and 4) firms’ network strategies and the outcomes thereof. As his research takes place at the intersection of different disciplines he has published in a wide range of economic, geography and management journals.
For further information and to rsvp please email Karen k3.taylor@qut.edu.au