Agency and Social Networks: Strategies of Action in a Social Structure of Position, Opposition, and Opportunity

Abstract

Research for this paper was partially supported by research grants from Boston College and the Boston CollegeCarroll School of Management. The authors would like to thank Barbara Davidson for her research assistance. The authors are indebted to Martin Kilduff, Ron Rice, several anonymous ASQ reviewers, ASQ Associate Editor Reed Nelson, and ASQ Managing Editor Linda Johanson for their insightful advice and comments.This study uses social movement concepts to explain the success and failure of actors in a network of relationships trying to influence policies on environmental issues in a small city. Results show that strategies to take action and mobilize others in a network of interorganizational relationships can vary depending on the social context, which consists of the political opportunity structure defined by government regulators, whether the actor faces opposition, and the actor's position in the network. Decisions to engage in strategies to try to influence government regulators directly, to use a broker to reach agreements with the opposition, or to form a coalition with actors in other organizations to influence government decision makers are affected by this social context. Results also show that even peripheral actors, usually assumed to be powerless in network studies, can influence policy if they use a direct-contact strategy and the political opportunity structure is favorable.0 Increasingly, studying networks has become an accepted way of understanding organizational life. Researchers have studied the networks of actors in the informal structure within organizations and have found, among other things, that connections to others in networks have effects on turnover (Krackhardt and Porter, 1985), power (Brass, 1984), and the adoption of innovations (Burkhardt and Brass, 1990). The network perspective has also been used to study relationships between organizations. We have become aware that economic relationships between organizations are embedded in networks of social relationships (Granovetter, 1985; Uzzi, 1997), many organizational activities now take place in joint ventures and alliances (Miles and Snow, 1986; Jones, Hesterly, and Borgatti, 1997), communities take action through interorganizational networks (Laumann, Galaskiewicz, and Marsden, 1978; Galaskiewicz, 1989), and public policies at the local (Laumann and Pappi, 1976) and the national levels (Laumann and Knoke, 1989) are negotiated through interorganizational networks of businesses, government agencies, interest groups, and lobbyists. Nevertheless, research on networks has, by and large, failed to connect the actions of individuals to their network position (Galaskiewicz, 1985;Emirbayer and Goodwin, 1994). Although a number of studies have established that a central network position for an individual or an organization is correlated with influence in a network of relationships (e.g., Brass, 1984), we do not know how these centrally located people use or do not use their influence in social situations. We do not know the strategies of act...

Value of digital information networks: a holonic framework

“…Network opportunities enable an actor to create or restructure prior network structures (see Child's notion of strategic choice [38]). Network opportunities and the inertial constraints imposed by prior network structures themselves mutually reinforce and perpetuate information structures through a structuration process [80,161]. Hence, markets and organizations are networks of interdependent groups, in which information flows at higher speed within than across group boundaries [30].…”

Networks and the Organization of Identity: The Case of Norwegian Snowboarding

“…In relation to the present case it seems apt to focus on the strands that have investigated networks as linked to communities, whether these communities are professional (Greenwood, Suddaby, & Hinings, 2002;Oliver & Montgomery, 2005) or non-profit (Castells, 1996;Putnam, 2001;Stevenson & Greenberg, 2000).…”

A Dynamic Theory of Network Failure

“…In this paper we argue that to improve our understanding of network failure we need to push forward the theoretical agenda answering the more general call for network theories towards the study of network dynamics and micro-processes (Ahuja, Soda, & Zaheer, 2012) and of the role individual agency plays in them (Stevenson & Greenberg, 2000).…”