From the Bottom Up? Technical Committee Activity and Alliance Formation

Abstract

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...

Contacts and Contracts: Cross-Level Network Dynamics in the Development of an Aircraft Material

“…This has been confirmed in studies focusing on ties originating from previous exchanges among leaders (Barden and Mitchell 2007), executives' previous jobs (Eisenhardt andSchoonhoven 1996, Kim andHiggins 2007), and interlocking directorates (Gulati and Westphal 1999). Research has focused mostly on senior executives, but midlevel managers participating in technical committees (Rosenkopf et al 2001) and other boundary spanners engaged in interorganizational exchanges have also been found to aid the formation of interorganizational ties (Barden and Mitchell 2007).…”

“…For example, endogenous network dynamics cannot explain how to access networks without having a prior position in them (Rosenkopf et al 2001). Indeed, process studies of organizational network dynamics found intentional network design alongside pathdependent network development mechanisms (Doz et al 2000, Koza and Lewin 1999, Sydow 2004).…”

“…In other words, informal contacts lead to formal contracts (cf. Rosenkopf et al 2001). Prospecting opens up new opportunities for network development.…”

“…Indeed, process studies of organizational network dynamics found intentional network design alongside pathdependent network development mechanisms (Doz et al 2000, Koza and Lewin 1999, Sydow 2004). Firms and individuals may undertake strategic activities to sidestep structures that inhibit network transformation (Capaldo 2007, Rosenkopf et al 2001, proactively manage relationships through subsequent stages (D'Aunno and Zuckerman 1987, Jap and Anderson 2007), or steer relationship development iteratively, through learning and adaptation to changing conditions (Ariño and de la Torre 1998, Doz 1996, Kumar and Nti 1998, Ring and Van de Ven 1994.…”

“…However, few empirical studies have investigated the interaction between interorganizational networks and interpersonal networks (Brass et al 2004, Gulati 2007, Marchington and Vincent 2004. Those studies that looked at the interplay of the two levels have been limited to cross-level effects in existing interorganizational collaborations (Gulati and Sytch 2008, Seabright et al 1992, Zaheer et al 1998 and the role of personal relations in the formation of dyadic interorganizational relations (Barden and Mitchell 2007, Gulati and Westphal 1999, Rosenkopf et al 2001. In this paper, we aim for more comprehensive understanding of the network dynamics resulting from these multiple levels of embeddedness.…”