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Towards a Network Perspective on Organizational Decline

This chapter is a reprint of the article “Towards a Network Perspective on Organizational Decline” published in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy Volume 17 Issue 7/8 (1997).

Collaboration and Competition in Business Ecosystems

ISBN: 978-1-78190-826-6, eISBN: 978-1-78190-827-3

Publication date: 26 August 2014

Abstract

Analysis of organizational decline has become central to the study of economy and society. Further advances in this area may fail however, because two major literatures on the topic remain disintegrated and because both lack a sophisticated account of how social structure and interdependencies among organizations affect decline. This paper develops a perspective which tries to overcome these problems. The perspective explains decline through an understanding of how social ties and resource dependencies among firms affect market structure and the resulting behavior of firms within it. Evidence is furnished that supports the assumptions of the perspective and provides a basis for specifying propositions about the effect of network structure on organizational survival. I conclude by discussing the perspective’s implications for organizational theory and economic sociology.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments

I thank Bruce Carruthers, Mark Granovetter, Frank Romo, Michael Sacks, and Michael Schwartz for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Grants from The National Science Foundation (SES-9200960), Sigma XI, and The Institute for Social Analysis (ISA) at the State University of New York at Stony Brook supported this research. An earlier version of this paper won the 1993 Society for Socio-economics Best Paper Prize.

Citation

Uzzi, B. (2014), "Towards a Network Perspective on Organizational Decline

This chapter is a reprint of the article “Towards a Network Perspective on Organizational Decline” published in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy Volume 17 Issue 7/8 (1997).

", Collaboration and Competition in Business Ecosystems (Advances in Strategic Management, Vol. 30), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 351-387. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0742-3322(2013)0000030014

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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