Josh Whitford

The Anatomy of Network Failure

This article develops and defends a theory of “network failure” analogous to more familiar theories of organizational and market failure already prevalent in the literature on economic governance. It theorizes those failures not as the simple absence of network governance, but rather as a situation in which transactional conditions for network desirability obtain but network governance is impeded either by ignorance or opportunism, or by a combination of the two. It depicts network failures as continuous rather than discrete outcomes, shows that they have more than one cause, and pays particular attention to two undertheorized—if not undiscovered—types of network failure (i.e., involution and contested collaboration). It thereby contributes to the development of sociologys toolkit for theorizing networks that are “neither market nor hierarchy.”

Industrial Policy in the United States: A Neo-Polanyian Interpretation

The conventional wisdom holds that U.S. political institutions are inhospitable to industrial policy. The authors call the conventional wisdom into question by making four claims: (1) the activities targeted by industrial policy are increasingly governed by decentralized production networks rather than markets or hierarchies, (2) “network failures” are therefore no less threatening to industrial dynamism than market or organizational failures, (3) the spatial and organizational decentralization of production have simultaneously increased the demand and broadened the support for American industrial policy, and (4) political decentralization is therefore likely to improve the functioning of industrial policies designed to combat network failures.

Waltzing, Relational Work, and the Construction (or Not) of Collaboration in Manufacturing Industries

The article uses a case study of relationships in American manufacturing industries to demonstrate the utility of documenting the “relational work” that managers do as they negotiate circumstances where either roles or norms are ambiguous. It shows that the explicit identification of the role that relational work plays in those relationships story militates for—and extends, improves upon, and arguably completes—a particular understanding of what economic sociologists should mean when they talk about the “embedding” of the economic in social relations. The article hence shows the utility of jointly using otherwise disparate perspectives in the analysis of interorganizational relationships, and thus contributes to the development of a more unified paradigm in economic sociology.

The Network Firm as a Political Coalition

The article uses a qualitative case study of fifteen years in the production network that revolves about Fiat Auto to depict the “network firm” as a political coalition. The analysis touches on Fiat’s radical outsourcing of production in the 1990s, a short-lived and ill-fated alliance with General Motors in 2001, a descent to the brink of bankruptcy in 2004, a return to profitability by 2007, and, finally, the acquisition of control of Chrysler in 2009. The article reconstructs James March’s classic Carnegie model of the firm in light of the blurring of organizational boundaries. By marrying that model with ideas drawn from the literatures on organizational networks, social movements, and organizational politics, the article demonstrates that strategic decision-making at Fiat and at key suppliers shaped, and was shaped by, an interplay of frames and relational embedding within and across organizational boundaries. This shows how coalitional politics shape and are shaped by the shifting boundaries of the firm, and how those politics affect the evolution of the production networks that prevail across many contemporary industries.

Brokerage and Boots on the Ground: Complements or Substitutes in the Manufacturing Extension Partnerships?

There is more agreement on the need for advisory services to help small and midsized manufacturers keep up with the latest managerial techniques and technologies than there is on the optimal design of those services. This study reconfigures and reanalyzes administrative data from the American Manufacturing Extension Partnership, and draws on extensive interviews with “street-level bureaucrats” at Manufacturing Extension Partnership centers, to identify and compare variation in centers’ approaches to service delivery. Centers and clients who rely on third-party providers tend to have more rather than less enduring ties, suggesting that it’s direct delivery, rather than brokerage, that is associated with one-shot deals. There is evidence also that projects generate the most impact when they help “get the relationships right” and mitigate network failures.

Behavioral Decision-Making and Network Dynamics: A Political Perspective

The blurring of organizational boundaries and the adoption of networks as a prominent form of governance have largely contributed to reinforcing interdependence between internal and external organizational networks as well as between formal and informal ties. This chapter tries to broaden existing theoretical models in order to explain the behavioral decision-making process of the firm and how it is shaped by the complex and interactive dynamics of these networks. The theoretical perspective employed in the chapter suggests that a firm’s behavior is influenced by organizational politics. Although this actually does not constitute a fresh perspective within organizational and management studies, in this chapter it is revamped and widened in light of the mentioned changes within and across firms’ organizational boundaries. The starting point of our discussion is March’s seminal work (March in Journal of Politics 24(4):662–678, 1962) and his model of “the business firm as a political coalition”. Subsequently, drawing also on later organizational politics literature we show the limits and opportunities of adopting such an imagery not only for the traditional business firm but also for the contemporary network organization: through it we can improve our understanding of how organizational boundaries are defined today, why company leaders choose the strategies they choose, and how and why those strategies are (or are not) implemented. In order to explain patterns of organizational behavior in a world of blurred-but existent firm boundaries we finally draw on a more recent sociological literature on social movements that also highlights for “patterns of mobilization distinct from both lines of formal authority and the personal ties of informal organization” (Clemens, Where Do We Stand? Common Mechanisms in Organizations and Social Movements Research, in Davis G, McAdam D, Scott WR, Zald M (eds) Social movements and organization theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 356, 2005). Indeed, such a literature recognized the central role of networks, their evolutionary dynamics, and interactions between the internal and the external and between the formal and the informal.