Paul Ingram

Friendships among competitors in the Sydney hotel industry

Friendships with competitors can improve the performance of organizations through the mechanisms of enhanced collaboration, mitigated competition, and better information exchange. Moreover, these benefits are best achieved when competing managers are embedded in a cohesive network of friendships (i.e., one with many friendships among competitors), since cohesion facilitates the verification of information culled from the network, eliminates the structural holes faced by customers, and facilitates the normative control of competitors. The first part of this analysis examines the performance implications of the friendship‐network structure within the Sydney hotel industry, with performance being the yield (i.e., revenue per available room) of a given hotel. This shows that friendships with competitors lead to dramatic improvements in hotel yields. Performance is further improved if a manager’s competitors are themselves friends, evidencing the benefit of cohesive friendship networks. The second part of the analysis examines the structure of friendship ties among hotel managers and shows that friendships are more likely between managers who are competitors.

Institutional and Resource Dependence Determinants of Responsiveness to Work-Family Issues

Whether and how organizations choose strategies that address pressures from both their exchange and the institutional environments has recently become a central question in organization theory. We ...

From the Head and the Heart: Locating Cognition- and Affect-Based Trust in Managers' Professional Networks

This article investigates the configuration of cognition- and affect-based trust in managers’ professional networks, examining how these two types of trust are associated with relational content and structure. Results indicate that cognition-based trust is positively associated with economic resource, task advice, and career guidance ties, whereas affect-based trust is positively associated with friendship and career guidance ties but negatively associated with economic resource ties. The extent of embeddedness in a network through positive ties increases affect-based trust, whereas that through negative ties decreases cognition-based trust. These findings illuminate how trust arises in networks and inform network research that invokes trust to explain managerial outcomes.

The intergovernmental network of world trade : IGO connectedness, governance, and embeddedness

Membership in certain intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), such as the World Trade Organization, has long been argued to stimulate trade. Yet, evidence linking IGOs to trade is mixed. The authors argue that identifying the influence of IGOs requires attention not only to the institutions IGOs enact, but also to the network through which they enact them. This approach allows them to demonstrate that trade between two countries increases by an average of 58% with every doubling of the strength of IGO connection between the countries. They also contribute to debates regarding the mechanisms through which structural relationships influence economic behavior by showing that substantial trade benefits occur not only through economic IGOs, but also through IGOs that were formed for social and cultural purposes, and that connections through IGOs that are organizationally strong have more impact than those through minimalist IGOs.

The Transfer of Experience in Groups of Organizations: Implications for Performance and Competition

Groups of organizations are pervasive, although there is little systematic knowledge about how they affect their members. We examine one dimension of the operation of organization groups, the transfer of experience. Our core argument is that organization groups may create benefits for their members, but problems for those outside the group. Within the group they can facilitate the transfer of experience among their members by creating mechanisms for communication, incentives for helping, and by promoting understanding. The predicted pattern of experience transfer should improve performance of those within the group, but also has implications for those outside it. Experience accumulated in one organization group strengthens the competitiveness of its organizations, and thereby harms competitors outside the group. Thus, organization groups are fundamental both for the functioning of their members and the competitive dynamics of their industries. Our longitudinal analysis of the profitability of kibbutz agriculture supports both these claims. Between 1954 and 1965 (the years of this study), almost all kibbutzim were part of organization groups. Kibbutzim became more profitable as a function of the experience of others in their group. Their profitability was reduced, however, as a function of experience of others outside their group.

Trouble in Store: Probes, Protests and Store Openings by Wal-Mart, 1998-2007

The authors consider how uncertainty over protest occurrence shapes the strategic interaction between companies and activists. Analyzing Wal‐Mart, the authors find support for their theory that companies respond to this uncertainty through a “test for protest” approach. In Wal‐Mart’s case, this consists of low‐cost probes in the form of new store proposals. They then withdraw if they face protests, especially when those protests signal future problems. Wal‐Mart is more likely to open stores that are particularly profitable, even if they are protested. This uncertainty‐based account stands in sharp contrast to full‐information models that characterize protests as rare miscalculations.

Do People Mix at Mixers? Structure, Homophily, and the “Life of the Party”

We used electronic name tags to conduct a fine-grained analysis of the pattern of socializing dynamics at a mixer attended by about 100 business people, to examine whether individuals in such minimally structured social events can initiate new and different contacts, despite the tendency to interact with those they already know or who are similar to them. The results show that guests did not mix as much as might be expected in terms of making new contacts. They were much more likely to encounter their pre-mixer friends, even though they overwhelmingly stated before the event that their goal was to meet new people. At the same time, guests did mix in the sense of encountering others who were different from themselves in terms of sex, race, education, and job. There was no evidence of homophily (attraction to similar others) in the average encounter, although it did operate for some guests at some points in the mixer. Results also revealed a phenomenon that we call “associative homophily,” in which guests were more likely to join and continue engagement with a group as long as it contained at least one other person of the same race as them. We consider the implications of these results for organizations and individuals seeking to develop their networks and for theories of network dynamics.

The Global Rise of Democracy: A Network Account

We examine the influence of an interstate network created by intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) on the global diffusion of democracy. We propose that IGOs facilitate democracy’s diffusion by transmitting information between member states and by interpreting that information according to prevailing norms in the world society, where democracy is viewed as the legitimate form of government. We employ a network autocorrelation model to track changes in democracy among all of the world’s countries from 1815 to 2000. We find that democracy does diffuse through the IGO network and that the influence of democratic countries is stronger than that of undemocratic countries. Evidence indicates that the IGO network serves as a basis for normative diffusion. This is an important contribution to sociological accounts of globalization, which tend to emphasize diffusion divorced from network structure or diffusion dependent on the coercive influence of a small set of international organizations.

6 Structure, Affect and Identity as Bases of Organizational Competition and Cooperation

AbstractCompeting organizations are often defined by their niche overlap or structural equivalence in resource dependence, but the very structure that defines competitors can also identify cooperators. There is a fine line between competition and cooperation, but current theories give insufficient guidance as to which will take place and also contribute to the belief that cooperation between competitors is illegitimate. We show that the legitimacy of these practices, as well the evaluation of their welfare implications, are context bound. Individuals and societies that have been influenced by different theories of competition could reasonably (and have) reach different conclusions as to the legitimacy of competitor cooperation. We then critique extant ideas as to when competitors will cooperate, which rely on industry structure, and suggest instead that perception and social identity are more important in tipping the cooperate–compete balance. We conclude by showing how our arguments inform an important c...

The failure of private regulation: Elite control and market crises in the Manhattan banking industry

In this paper, we develop an account of the failure of private market-governance institutions to maintain market order by highlighting how control of their distributional function by powerful elites limits their regulatory capacity. We examine the New York Clearing House Association (NYCHA), a private market-governance institution among commercial banks in Manhattan that operated from 1853 to 1913. We find that the NYCHA, founded to achieve coordinating benefits among banks and to limit the effect of financial panics, evolved at the turn of the twentieth century into a device for large, elite market players to promote their own interests to the disadvantage of rival groups that were not members. Elites prevented the rest of the market from having equal opportunities to participate in emergency loan programs during bank panics. The elites’ control not only worsened the condition of the rest of the market by allowing non-member banks to fail; it also diminished the influence of the NYCHA and escalated market crises as bank failures spread to member banks. As a result, crises developed to an extent that exceeded the control of the NYCHA and ended up hurting even elites’ own interests. This paper suggests that institutional stability rests on a deliberate balance of interests between different market sectors and that, without such a balance, the distributional function of market-governance institutions plants the seeds of institutional destruction.