We examined responses to institutional complexity by studying when and how organizations respond to a coercive institutional demand from a powerful constituent when other important constituents do not accept the demand as legitimate. We experimentally manipulated institutional complexity and gauged the time to compliance of 100 childcare managers in the Netherlands, then asked them to describe and explain their anticipated responses to multiple pressures. We found that institutional complexity leads decision makers to delay compliance, but usually not passively: decision makers used the time before compliance to attempt to reduce institutional complexity by neutralizing opposing pressures, challenging the coercive pressure, adapting the practice to suit opponents and their own personal beliefs, and/or waiting to see how the situation would unfold as multiple parties influenced one another. We found two factors influenced decision-makers choice of responses: their interpretation of institutional complexity and their personal beliefs toward the practice itself. Our findings contribute to an emerging understanding of how decision makers interpret and respond to institutional complexity, and complement recent studies in the institutional complexity literature.

Economic network theory emphasises the importance of external resource mobilisation. In this paper, the relations between the mobilisation and use of internal and external resources in innovation processes, and the innovative performance of ®rms, are explored empirically, using an adapted version of Ha Êkansson's (1987) economic network model. The main research question was: to what extent do network variables contribute to the innovative performance of ®rms? To answer this question, we assessed the explanatory power of economic network theory within the empirical study of innovation. Firms were found to engage in various con®gurations of internal and external resource bases, enabling them to innovate with better results. The relations in the estimated models are strongly in¯uenced by moderating variables such as sector, and type and level of innovations produced. Our main conclusion is that models that include both internal and external resources explain the innovative performance better than models in which only internal resources are used.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractThis paper pursues the development of a theoretical framework that explains interactive learning between innovating firms and external actors in the public knowledge infrastructure and the production chain. Our research question is: Why do innovating firms engage in interactive learning? In our theoretical framework we augment the resource-based perspective predominant in network theory with an activity-based account and a structural account of interactive learning. We contend basically: that higher technological dynamics induce innovative activities with a higher complexity. More complex innovative activities increase the probability of internal resource deficits/shortages in the innovating firms. The higher the resource deficits/shortages and the lower the alignment of innovative activities the more likely the search for complementary resources externally, which induces higher levels of interactive learning.In order to test the generality of our theoretical claims we estimate four models predicting: 1) the level Our findings show that antecedents of patterns of interactive learning differ widely and are contingent upon the type of actors and sectoral technological dynamics. A highly differentiated pattern of interaction between the quality of the resource base and the complexity of innovative activities was found.3

In this paper, we study to what extent inconsistent feedback signals about performance affect firm adaptive behavior in terms of changes made to research-and-development (R&D) investments. We argue that inconsistency in performance feedback-based on discrepancies between two distinct performance signals-affects the degree to which such investments will be changed. Our aim is to show that accounting for inconsistent performance feedback is necessary as predictions for the direction of change in R&D investments based on the individual performance feedback signals are contradictory. Furthermore, we contribute by proposing a holistic consideration mechanism as an alternative to the selective attention mechanism previously applied to inconsistent performance feedback. Our findings show that the impact of inconsistency depends on the exact configuration of the underlying performance feedback signal discrepancies. While consistently negative performance feedback signals would amplify their impact in stimulating increased R&D investments, inconsistent performance feedback signals created more nuanced effects. Having lower performance compared to an industry-based peer group-despite doing well compared to the previous year-made firms decrease their R&D investments. For the Acknowledgments: This article was accepted under the editorship of Patrick M. Wright.