ABSTRACT:The ubiquity of family dominated firms in economies worldwide suggests that inquiry into the nature of the ethical frames of these types of firms is increasingly important. In the context of a social exchange approach and the norm of reciprocity, this manuscript addresses social cohesion in a dominant family firm coalition. It is argued that the factors underlying this cohesion, direct versus indirect reciprocity, shape unique attributes of family firms such as intentions for transgenerational sustainability, the pursuit of non-economic goals, and strong interpersonal ties. Exchange structures, represented by direct and indirect reciprocity, lead family and non-family firms toward development of distinctive ethical frames of reference.

Over the past two decades, several new perspectives have emerged in the physical and natural sciences and are collectively referred to as the complexity sciences. Insights from these emerging perspectives have implications that merit consideration for developments and extensions of existing work at the metatheoretical, theoretical, and methodological levels in organization theory. The purpose of this manuscript is to: (a) provide an overview of the complexity sciences, (b) provide a justification and rationale for their inclusion into the social sciences, and (c) review the current organizational literature which utilizes and applies concepts from the complexity sciences to organizational phenomena.

Arguments deriving from the importance of the strength of social ties between individuals are being applied in social and organizational analysis; however, lack of empirical verification of the components of the construct and lack of consistency in the use of proxy measures have made difficult the resolution of controversies surrounding the relative merits of strong and weak ties. This study examined the relations between predictors and indicators of Granovetter's 1973 construct of tie strength. Marsden and Campbell's 1984 finding of “contamination” of indicators by predictors is supported by this analysis.

Cause maps and social network analysis both use simple matrix techniques to represent organizational processes that are not well described using traditional research tools. These approaches are particularly suited to operationalizing the concepts of organizational complexity and structure in a concrete, practical manner. This article integrates these two techniques in the service of organizational diagnosis. Specifically, a juxtaposition matrix dividing organizational subunits into functional types and correlating these with critical organizational variables is created and analyzed Data from an empirical study of a small title company are used to illustrate the procedures developed and their relevance to the practical problems of actual organizations.

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