Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localize...

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Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks

http://onemvweb.com/sources/sources/network_structure_social_capital.pdf

The Network Structure Of Social Capital

While the recent focus on knowledge has undoubtedly benefited organizational studies, the literature still presents a sharply contrasting and even contradictory view of knowledge, which at times is described as "sticky" and at other times "leaky." This paper is written on the premise that there is more than a problem with metaphors at issue here, and more than accounts of different types of knowledge (such as "tacit" and "explicit") can readily explain. Rather, these contrary descriptions of knowledge reflect different, partial, and sometimes "balkanized" perspectives from which knowledge and organization are viewed. Taking the community of practice as a unifying unit of analysis for understanding knowledge in the firm, the paper suggests that often too much attention is paid to the idea of community, too little to the implications of practice. Practice, we suggest, creates epistemic differences among the communities within a firm, and the firm's advantage over the market lies in dynamically coordinating the knowledge produced by these communities despite such differences. In making this argument, we argue that analyses of systemic innovation should be extended to embrace all firms in a knowledge economy, not just the classically innovative. This extension will call for a transformation of conventional ideas coordination and of the trade-off between exploration and exploitation.

Knowledge and Organization: A Social-Practice Perspective

This article introduces the concept of the capability lifecycle (CLC), which articulates general patterns and paths in the evolution of organizational capabilities over time. The capability lifecycle provides a structure for a more comprehensive approach to dynamic resource-based theory. The analysis incorporates the founding, development, and maturity of capabilities in a manner that helps to explain the sources of heterogeneity in organizational capabilities. In addition, the analysis includes the "branching" of an original capability into several possible altered forms.

The Dynamic Resource-Based View: Capability Lifecycles

In recent years, the concept of boundaries has been at the center of influential research agendas in anthropology, history, political science, social psychology, and sociology. This article surveys some of these developments while describing the value added provided by the concept, particularly concerning the study of relational processes. It discusses literatures on (a) social and collective identity; (b) class, ethnic/racial, and gender/sex inequality; (c) professions, knowledge, and science; and (d) communities, national identities, and spatial boundaries. It points to similar processes at work across a range of institutions and social locations. It also suggests paths for further developments, focusing on the relationship between social and symbolic boundaries, cultural mechanisms for the production of boundaries, difference and hybridity, and cultural membership and group classifications.

The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences

This paper investigates the relationship between organizational aging and innovation processes to illuminate the dynamics of high-technology industries, as well to resolve debates in organizational...

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Aging, Obsolescence, and Organizational Innovation:

Prevailing research claims that strong corporate cultures improve firm performance by facilitating internal behavioral consistency. This paper addresses an unexamined implication of this argument by analyzing the effect of strong corporate cultures on the variability of firm performance. This relationship depends on how strong cultures affect organizational learning in response to internal and external change. I hypothesize that strong-culture firms excel at incremental change but encounter difficulties in more volatile environments. Results of analyses of a sample of firms from a broad variety of industries show that in relatively stable environments, strong-culture firms have more reliable (less variable) performance. In volatile environments, however, the reliability benefits of strong cultures disappear.

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The Strength of Corporate Culture and the Reliability of Firm Performance

This special issue contains six papers that address a variety of practical research process questions. The papers explore how theory and method inevitably interact in particular organization and management studies. Here we offer an overview of how theory and method have been treated to date by organization researchers and suggest that respecting both the primacy of theory and the primacy of evidence is no easy task but a necessary balancing practice that characterizes high-quality research.

The interplay between theory and method

We examine how the social structure of existing organizations influences entrepreneurship and suggest that resources accrue to entrepreneurs based on the structural position of their prior employers. We argue that information advantages allow individuals from entrepreneurially prominent prior firms to identify new opportunities. Entrepreneurial prominence also reduces the perceived uncertainty of a new venture. Using a sample of Silicon Valley start-ups, we demonstrate that entrepreneurial prominence is associated with initial strategy and the probability of attracting external financing. New ventures with high prominence are more likely to be innovators; furthermore, innovators with high prominence are more likely to obtain financing.

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7. Coming from good stock: Career histories and new venture formation

Franchising provides an increasingly important vehicle for entrepreneurial wealth creation and accounts for a large and growing share of business in the retail and service sectors. Chains—which operate in dispersed markets—most frequently use this form of governance. These firms must balance the centralization and standardization required for efficiency with the adaptation needed for success in varied local markets. By adopting an organizational learning perspective, we argue that the mix of company-owned and franchised units affects this balance, thereby influencing chain performance. In particular, the different incentives facing company managers and the entrepreneurs that manage franchises encourage distinct patterns of organizational learning. Franchised establishments provide better opportunities for the firm to learn through experimentation; however, companies find it easier to diffuse this information and enforce standards through their company-owned units. Analyses of franchised restaurant chains in the United States provide empirical evidence of this trade-off. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Jesper B. Sørensen

Papers

Aging, Obsolescence, and Organizational Innovation:

The Strength of Corporate Culture and the Reliability of Firm Performance

The interplay between theory and method

7. Coming from good stock: Career histories and new venture formation

Finding the right mix: franchising, organizational learning, and chain performance