and Rosemarie Ham Ziedonis, as well as seminar participants at Duke, Harvard, Maryland, Northwestern, NYU, and Wharton. We are especially grateful to Christine Oliver and the three anonymous reviewers for comments that greatly improved the paper, as well as Linda Johanson for her masterful copy editing We are indebted to Elaine Baskin, publisher of Communications Standards Review, for providing roster data from back issues in electronic form. We also appreciate the cooperation of Susan Hoyler and Eric Schimmel of the Telecommunications Industry Association. Science Quarterly, 46 (2001): 748-772 Technical Committee Activity the alliance formation literature is surprisingly silent on the systematic exploration of interorganizational mechanisms that might enable managers at this level to identify and assess alliance opportunities. Rather, the focus has been on top-level social networks, such as top team members' mobility or director interlocks, or on proxies such as technological similarity that can only suggest propensities for interaction. 748/AdministrativeOur study addresses these gaps by focusing on a domain in which actual interaction among lower-level managers may be observed. We focus on cellular firms' participation in industrywide technical committee activities, viewing the front-line managers as agents of interfirm collaboration. Technical committee activity is voluntary and non-contractual. Firms' participation in these activities generates interfirm ties with the potential for knowledge sharing. As such, this activity represents a pre-alliance network context, because interaction by technical professionals in these committees can generate the seeds of future alliances. We also explore conditions when this bottom-up type of alliance formation is likely to be amplified or diminished. COOPERATIVE TECHNICAL ORGANIZATIONS AND ALLIANCE FORMATIONInstitutions such as professional societies, trade associations, and standards bodies provide an essential coordination function for technological innovation, particularly for systemic technologies (Farrell and Saloner, 1988; Tushman and Rosenkopf, 1992; Garud and Kumaraswamy, 1995). The working groups, task forces, and technical committees formed by these institutions provide venues in which representatives of various firms and other constituencies share technical information, adjudicate technological differences, select standards, and negotiate future developments. We call these entities cooperative technical organizations (CTOs). A CTO is "a group that participates in technological information exchange, decision-making or standards-setting for a community" (Rosenkopf and Tushman, 1998: 31 5). In systemic industries, such as telecommunications, there are institutions with extensive histories and well-established structures. One prominent example is the large number of technical committees housed in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which was founded in 1865 and became a United Nations agency in 1947. The cooperative activity engendered by committees o...
The extensive literature on geographical clusters has argued that firms stand to gain from the knowledge spillovers and the easy availability of skills in regional agglomerations. At the same time, the research on strategic alliances, particularly in technology-intensive industries, views alliances as vehicles for the transfer of technology and knowledge. Does membership in a geographical cluster or a network of alliances-an alliance cluster-benefit firms equally? More importantly, does it matter whether firms form alliances with firms within their geographical cluster, or do they do better by reaching out beyond their cluster? In this paper, we investigate these and other related questions in the context of technology-intensive industries such as biotechnology and argue that the high-level knowledge sensing and acquiring needs of firms in such industries may require combinations of both kinds of knowledge-access mechanisms. We use the BioScan database to obtain 648 alliances for the period 1985-1998 among 248 public companies, and complement it with COMPUSTAT data to examine the effect of clustering and alliances on market value. Our results suggest that merely being part of geographical clusters is not enough, and nor is it adequate for firms to join alliance clusters. Rather, firms gain by forming alliances both within and beyond their geographical clusters, which highlights the complexities of acquiring technology-intensive knowledge and suggests that the acquisition of knowledge in technology-intensive settings is best achieved through mechanisms both formal and informal, both proximate and distant. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
There is near unanimous agreement that the performance of alliances usually falls short of expectations. Studies have identified several generic reasons for poor performance: inadequate communication, lack of trust, insufficient complementarity of resources, inappropriate organizational structures and processes, and so on. While we broadly agree with these, knowledge of these self-evident reasons does not seem to have turned the tide of bad news in any way. We show in this paper that it is important to unpack a broad set of antecedent variables, including the ones identified above, and to track them over the crucial formative stages of an alliance. Based on our interviews with 24 senior and middle level managers and professionals of a focal company about 10 of its major alliances, we identify the following four formative stages of an alliance: (1) Recognition, (2) Research, (3) Relationship Set-up, and (4) Ramp up. We show that the primary predictors of success across these stages are not identical, nor their effect uniform. Further, proper completion of all the preceding stages is essential for the success of subsequent stages. We finally show that the compaction of the various successful stages, in particular of the Ramp-Up stage, is one of the best predictors of overall success of an alliance.
Changing environmental conditions introduce uncertainty into organizational operations, and airlines respond in various ways. Scholars traditionally explore responses to environmental uncertainty by drawing upon theories of communication networks, coordination, organizational resilience, and high reliability organizing. Yet, the research has competing communication predictions, which makes planning and designing organizational responses challenging, as the level and type of uncertainty changes over time. Research also does not address variations in responses across different groups of employees. Using longitudinal network data from the United Airlines operations tower in Newark Airport (USA), this research examines communication for the purpose of relational coordination in a dynamically adaptive organizational network. Results reveal different patterns of organizational communication as different employee groups (frontline, cross-functional boundary spanners, and managers) face varying conditions of uncertainty. This paper concludes with theoretical contributions and practical recommendations for managing complex communication networks to respond to dynamic conditions of uncertainty in the airline operations settings.
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