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The purpose of this paper is to examine how a supply chain (SC) network helps small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to obtain liquidity and working capital for enhancing their performance while developing the relationships among SC members through information sharing. Moreover, this study also investigates whether a strong tie or bridge tie improves the availability of SMEs’ credit and performance.

Using a survey approach, data were collected from textile SMEs, located in Pakistan. Structural equation modeling and hierarchical regression model were run to validate the proposed model and the relationships.

Findings highlighted that strong tie and bridge tie of SMEs positively and significantly enhance the credit quality and SMEs’ performance. Furthermore, information sharing significantly moderates the relationship between SC network ties and SMEs’ credit quality. Credit quality significantly explains the indirect (mediation) association between the strong tie and the firm performance.

This study will help the SMEs’ entrepreneurs and SC executives to strengthen the liquidity position of SME and improve SMEs’ performance by developing the bridge ties. SMEs should share more information in their SC network while performing business transactions so that financers or lenders can easily access their operational capabilities and individual characteristics to offer them quality credit such as supply chain finance (SCF).

SMEs always face the issue of risk-free financing which adversely affects the firm performance. This study covered the hidden gap in SCM and SMEs’ financing literature by identifying the crucial role of SCF as quality credit in the development of SMEs. Moreover, SMEs can get benefits (e.g. quality credit=SCF) for better embedding in an SC network through information sharing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how a clustered foreign firm’s network ties of social capital and government relationship may affect its institutional legitimacy and performance for clustered firms in emerging economies. To accomplish this task, the authors identify network ties (e.g. bridging ties and strong ties) and show, for each, the direct effects on institutional legitimacy and organizational performance. The findings show that bridging ties, strong ties, and government relationship directly and significantly impact organizational performance.

This study used the two-step approach suggested by Anderson and Gerbing (1988). The first step uses confirmatory factor analysis to validate the psychometric properties of the measurement scales. The second step then uses structural equation modeling to examine the proposed hypotheses. The statistical software LISREL 8.80 was used for the data analysis.

This paper finds that industrial clusters serve an important legitimizing function for clustered firms. The corporate ties (both bridging and strong ties), institutional legitimacy, and governmental relationships all play a positive role in organizational performance in emerging economies. The government relationships are also found to have a positive effect on institutional legitimacy. The institutional legitimacy can develop from industrial clustering. The foreign enterprises within a cluster should pay attention to their vertical and horizontal relationships.

First, the questionnaires cannot be verified if these instructions were followed in each instance (because the responses were simply returned by mail). Second, this study grouped all foreign firms into one cluster. Other foreign firms may find that culture has different effects on their organizational performances in emerging economies. Third, the relationships and impacts of various factors were not investigated within the theoretical framework proposed in this study. Fourth, the study did not address the heterogeneity of domestic and foreign firms. Fifth, the study only focusses on the textile industry.

The institutional legitimacy can develop from industrial clustering. In order to make a good impression on the local government, clustered firms should adhere to government policy, hire more local workers and buy local raw materials. The foreign enterprises in emerging economies should recognize that, being inside of an industrial cluster, it is important to have strong ties with other cluster members and to interact frequently and honestly with the relevant government agencies and organizations. To enrich resource-utilizing and reduce their liability of foreignness, foreign firms within clusters should seek to increase their firms’ network ties and establish good relationships with local governments to obtain competitive advantage.

This study aims at filling that gap by using the concepts of strong ties, bridging ties of social capital, institutional legitimacy, and government relationship to understand how clustered firms influence institutionalization through corporate strategies. The analysis not only helps extend the literature on network ties configuration, but also expands the literature on institutionalization. The study explores how clustered firms actively built up their own advantageous positions and then combine these with their original passive interests to favorably enhance their competitiveness in rapidly changing and institutionally unstable emerging economies.

First, connects existing theories to provide an integrated theoretical framework for understanding the roles of social capital and institutional legitimacy. Second, provides evidence to the literature by examining how network ties and government relationship may jointly influence the performance for clustered foreign firms in emerging economies, an area largely ignored in prior research. Third, provides one theoretical lens through which different outcomes of social capital and institutional issues can be analyzed. Fourth, the authors put forward a relationship capability and an institutional capability model to study how firms can avoid risk and obtain benefits by clustering in emerging economies.

The literature on interfirm networks devotes scant attention to the ways collaborating firms combine and integrate the knowledge they share and to the subsequent learning outcomes. This study aims to investigate how motorsport companies use network ties to share and recombine knowledge and the learning that occurs both at the organizational and dyadic network levels.

The paper adopts a qualitative and inductive approach with the aim of developing theory from an in‐depth examination of the dyadic ties between motorsport companies and the way they share and recombine knowledge.

The research shows that motorsport companies having substantial competences at managing knowledge flows do so by getting advantage of bridging ties. While bridging ties allow motorsport companies to reach distant and diverse sources of knowledge, their strengthening and the formation of relational capital facilitate the mediation and overlapping of that knowledge.

The analysis rests on a qualitative account in a single industry and does not take into account different types of inter‐firm networks (e.g. alliances; constellations; consortia etc.) and governance structures. Cross‐industry analyses may provide a more fine‐grained picture of the practices used to recombine knowledge and the ideal composition of inter‐firm ties.

This study provides some interesting implications for scholars and managers concerned with the management of innovation activities at the interfirm level. From a managerial point of view, the recognition of the different roles played by network spanning connections is particularly salient and raises issues concerning the effective design and management of interfirm ties.

Although much of the literature emphasizes the role of bridging ties in connecting to diverse pools of knowledge, this paper goes one step further and investigates in more depth how firms gather and combine distant and heterogeneous sources of knowledge through the use of strengthened bridging ties and a micro‐context conducive to high quality relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of small and medium enterprises (SMEs)’ supply chain network on influencing credit quality, or more specifically, whether bridging tie (structural network) or strong tie (relational network) of SMEs in the supply chain can improve the availability of equity and debt capital through information sharing.

A survey was conducted in manufacturing industry in China and 208 valid questionnaires were used to test all the hypotheses. The data were then analyzed by employing partial least squares path modeling.

The results suggest that both strong tie and bridging tie of SMEs can lead to a positive effect on information sharing in supply chain, which can further enhance the credit quality for SMEs. However, without information sharing, the strong tie has not significant influence on SMEs’ credit quality, while bridging tie can directly impact on credit quality.

Despite their crucial role in sustaining national economies, SMEs are beset by the critical constraint of risk-free financing. Based on a survey, this research finds that the credit quality of SMEs is affected by two important factors: one concerns information sharing in supply chain and the other relates to the attributes of SMEs’ supply chain network. This study implies that a SME may have a financing advantage for better embedding in the supply chain network, but different effects will be experienced according to constraints associated with information asymmetry in the supply chain.

In this study, we seek to broaden the research focus in the strategic alliance literature from a firm's “partner strategy” to its “network strategy” by linking a firm's partnering choices to changes in its network position over time. Using data on all underwriting syndicates in Canada over nearly 40 years, we conceptualize and model the interplay between an investment bank's own and its partners’ syndicate participation. Our findings indicate that the lead banks, which have greater discretion in choosing syndicate partners than co-lead banks, are more likely to make partner selections that create bridging positions that provide access to timely and non-redundant information as well as opportunities to play a broker role across unconnected others. We also find, however, that lead banks’ bridging positions deteriorate when they form ties with other lead banks. Network-based competitive advantages are thus influenced by network opportunities and constraints as well as partner-specific concerns, suggesting that new insights into the dynamics of interfirm networks and competitive advantage of firms are possible within this broader view.

Social capital plays an important role in transforming knowledge within and across inter-firm business networks in industries. The purpose of this paper is to explore different kinds of transfer mechanism such as “bonding,” “bridging,” and “protecting” within a case network of the Danish offshore windmill industry. Its aim is to describe how these mechanisms interactively support value co-creation among the involved enterprises and how social capital, residing in the relationships between actors from the firms, is influenced by the different transfer mechanisms.

Based upon a single case study, the paper demonstrates “bonding,” “bridging,” and “protecting” as distinct, yet related, mechanisms for inter-firm business networking. The sample used covers selected key actors from the network as well as third-party experts from the Danish windmill industry, which together represent the most important knowledge-offering and knowledge-demanding domains.

Activities associated with “bridging” and “bonding” clearly matter for creating value for the business network and the industry alike, as they are supportive of strategic capability development (for instance, high-skilled work). While producers and supply companies apply such “bridging,” “bonding,” and additional “protecting” mechanisms based upon their predominant position, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), however, need to shape teams to do so. A major finding of the study is, thus, that team-based interrelationships among SMEs activate “bridging,” “bonding.” and “protecting” initiatives which are particularly supportive of capability improvement and industry growth. They enable the transfer of relevant capabilities between different projects where actors within SMEs organizations learn to activate and use such knowledge transfer mechanisms. Moreover, asymmetrical dependency-relationships can be partly overcome by shaping and using the mechanisms on the part of SMEs in the network.

To date, brokerage is still an under-explored topic with regard to inter-firm business networks. This case study contributes to the research by illustrating important and distinct qualitative aspects of brokerage, which are conceptualized as “bonding,” “bridging,” and “protecting” initiatives on the part of brokers. The study highlights that not only strong actors with central positions can step into the role as a broker. Even less resourceful actors within asymmetrical relations can act as broker and compensate a lack of resources or strengthen their position within the industry network. Consequently, value co-creating processes within industry networks can also be boosted by brokerage initiated by small companies.

The authors investigate the contributions of social capital (SC) dimensions (bridging, bonding and linking) in crowdfunding campaigns by comparing the dynamics of agri-food businesses with those of two other sectors – cultural and technological.

The authors develop linear regressions on a proprietary data set of 5,290 projects launched on the Italian platform “Produzionidalbasso.com”, from 2014 to 2020.

The authors’ findings suggest that combining the three social capital dimensions (bridging, bonding and linking) has a more substantial overall effect on the number of backers involved in agri-food projects than in cultural and technological projects. Agri-food entrepreneurs effectively mobilize all resources embedded in the SC dimensions and therefore create the conditions to develop new ties that financially support the project.

Agri-food entrepreneurs may benefit from those results improving their funding strategies. Therefore, agri-food entrepreneurs can explore and exploit the instruments available on the CFD platform – video and rewards associated with the campaign – gaining more benefit from the backers involved compared with other project categories.

The study proposes a broader perspective regarding SC that encompasses the proponent, the company and the campaign with three different types of ties: bonding, bridging and linking. These SC dimensions can differently shape diverse sectors and this eclectic configuration can differentiate the effects of SC in crowdfunding campaigns. This study pinpoints how crowdfunding determinants change, based on project categories.

This paper aims to describe the personal information and help networks of people with HIV/AIDS (PHAs) in rural Canada, and to present a research‐based model of how and why these networks developed. This model seeks to consider the roles of PHAs, their family members/friends and formal health systems in network formation.

In‐depth, semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 114 PHAs, their friends/family members (FFs) and formal caregivers in three rural regions of Canada. A network solicitation procedure elicited PHAs' HIV/AIDS information/help networks. Interviews were analyzed qualitatively, and network data were analyzed statistically. Documents describing health systems in each region were also analyzed. Analyses used social capital theory, supplemented by stress/coping and stigma management theories.

PHAs' HIV/AIDS‐related information/help networks emphasized linking and bonding social capital with minimal bridging social capital. This paper presents a model that explains how and why such networks developed. The model shows that networks grew from the actions of PHAs, their FFs and health systems. PHAs experienced considerable stress, which led them to develop information/help networks to cope with HIV/AIDS – both individually and collaboratively. Because of stigmatization, many PHAs disclosed their illness selectively, thus constraining the size and composition of their networks. Health system actors created network‐building opportunities for PHAs by providing them with care, referrals and support programs.

This study describes and explains an understudied type of information behavior: information/help network development at individual, group and institutional levels. As such, it illuminates the complex dynamics that made individual acts of interpersonal information acquisition and sharing possible.

Governments increasingly promote employment through social networks (whether via formal job networks or informal personal networks). However, they rarely account for how weak-tie “bridging” networks and strong-tie “bonding” networks differentially affect employment outcomes. Given criticism that (usually weak-tie bridging-focussed) formal job networks are overly focussed on finding entry-level (i.e. any) jobs, it is imperative to understand the impact of strong and weak ties on securing work with good conditions, or of meaning to the worker. Such links are poorly understood in the present literature. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This study uses national Australian survey data to assess whether support from close “friends” or distant “acquaintances” is associated with employment outcomes such as finding any work or “meaningful” work.

The results show that relatively distant ties (close acquaintances) and emotional support from friends are each associated with reduced chances of being an unemployed/discouraged worker. Stronger ties (close friends) are associated with better chances of a having a “meaningful” job.

More attention should be paid to tie strength dynamics and meaningful employment outcomes in the delivery of employment services. In particular, a role for active “close-tie brokers” in promoting networks should be investigated, instead of expecting/pushing the unemployed to rely on either extremely close or distant connections.

This is the first study to find a link between network type and meaningful work, which has important implications for the delivery of employment services.

Inter-organizational alliances and the networks they generate have been a central topic in organization theory over the last decade. However, network analyses per se have been static. Even when information over time has been available, the temporal component has been set aside or aggregated to the end point of the study. Substantially more research has been conducted on organizations initiating inter-organizational relationships. The organization-level research has been decidedly dynamic in nature. However, organization-level research has largely examined the structural characteristics of the networks generated by organizational actions. Work combining network-level and organization-level phenomena has been rare and, to our knowledge, no research including the effects of organization-level actions on the evolution of network-level phenomena has occurred.

In this chapter we use more than 6000 R&D alliances and more than 6500 M&D alliances initiated by more than 1000 biotech firms in the U.S. over a 30 year period to construct quarterly networks. We test 13 hypotheses linking the actions of the firms to changes in network structure. Utilizing hazard-rate models we test the effects of institutional status, positional status (centrality), and structural status (coreness) of firms on their propensity to form ties with different structural consequences. Our research indicates that both R&D and M&D networks in U.S. biotechnology are developing a distinct core/periphery structure over time. Furthermore, we find support for a process of preferential attachment wherein organizations are more likely to form ties with organizations of similar institutional and structural status. Furthermore, we find evidence for cross effects, for example attachment processes that enfold across the two networks.