Ben M. Bensaou

Players and Purists: Networking Strategies and Agency of Service Professionals

Social capital research has established the performance advantages of networking. However, we know surprisingly little about the strategies individuals employ when networking and, in particular, the underlying agency mechanisms involved. Network analysis tends to presume structural determinism and ignore issues of endogeneity rather than explore how actors draw on schemas, beliefs, and values in developing their networks. This empirical paper induces three networking strategies of newly promoted service professionals operating within two firms (AuditCo and ConsultCo) over a 16-month period. Using a grounded theory building approach, we first establish a set of core categories that capture networking behavior. We then conduct a cluster analysis revealing three distinct networking configurations or strategies: Devoted Players, Purists, and Selective Players. We also reveal the distinct agency involved in each profile and investigate the extent to which these networking strategies correlate with variables that shed light on issues of endogeneity and deepen our understanding of the strategies (including network structure and socialization progress in the players’ new jobs).

Information Technology in Japan: Are There Lessons for the West?

Western visitors to Japan, studying what levels of information technology (IT) applications are actually on the ground, tend to come back puzzled by what they see. While they have been exhorted for the last two decades to invest in IT with the promise of a better competitive position, they have seen their Japanese counterparts inexorably gain ground, yet without seemingly investing in new information technologies as. much. How have Japanese firms been so competitive, and indeed, taught Western companies lessons on JIT (just-in-time), TQM (total quality management), concurrent engineering and global market-building, without investment in modern IT? Is it really the case that Japanese firms lag behind their US and European competitors in organizational computing? If so, why didn’t information technology take hold in Japanese corporations? Have they developed an alternative way to manage information? Is past Western practice a guide for Japanese managers, or is Japan once again giving birth to a new paradigm for effective management with information technology?