Embeddedness

About: Embeddedness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4773 publications have been published within this topic receiving 229721 citations.

Networking Beyond Organizational Boundaries: The Case of Project Organizations

Abstract: Project organizations operate in environments where innovation depends significantly on the ability to integrate different but interrelated knowledge bases. These knowledge bases include individuals who are located outside organizational boundaries and have no formal relationship with the organization, but are connected socially to project workers. Organizational researchers have generally recognized the importance of external social relations for knowledge search. However there is some debate on the question of whether social networks are more useful for innovation if they provide social cohesion through close interaction or access to diverse and novel sources of knowledge through more distant relationships. This study explores the configuration of project workers’ external social networks and their effects on innovative behaviour, using data on the network ties of workers in 17 project organizations in the new-media industry. The findings are more consistent with the social embeddedness view of close social relations providing an important source of continuity in markets where intermittent projects are common. Project workers embedded in cohesive work-related social structures outside the organization tend to be more innovative in their project work than workers lacking such networks.

Stakeholder Salience for Small Businesses: A Social Proximity Perspective

Abstract: This paper advances stakeholder salience theory from the viewpoint of small businesses. It is argued that the stakeholder salience process for small businesses is influenced by their local embeddedness, captured by the idea of social proximity, and characterised by multiple relationships that the owner-manager and stakeholders share beyond the business context. It is further stated that the ethics of care is a valuable ethical lens through which to understand social proximity in small businesses. The contribution of the study conceptualises how the perceived social proximity between local stakeholders and small business owner-managers influences managerial considerations of the legitimacy, power and urgency of stakeholders and their claims. Specifically, the paradoxical nature of close relationships in the salience process is acknowledged and discussed.

Ethnocentrism in the low countries: A comparative perspective

Abstract: This study explores differences of ethnocentrism and related phenomena in The Netherlands and Flanders on the basis of two comparable surveys conducted in 1990 and 1991. The explanatory models derived from theories of ethnocentrism are largely confirmed. People in Flanders subscribe more strongly to both components of ethnocentrism (i.e. to an unfavourable attitude towards out‐groups and to a favourable attitude towards the in‐group) as well as to a number of its predictors such as authoritarianism, anomie, and social cultural localism. The interpretations of these findings involve historical processes, intergroup tensions, economic fluctuations, and the organisational embeddedness of right‐wing extremism in The Netherlands and in Flanders.

After Minimalism: Transformations of State Bar Associations from Market Dependence to State Reliance, 1918 to 1950

Abstract: Compared to conventional approaches, we conceptualize transformations in populations of organizations in terms of shifts in their relative embeddedness in markets and states. As organizations expand beyond minimalist conditions of existence, states and markets offer alternative solutions to the core problems of persistence: obtaining resources, managing competition, and constructing legitimacy. By analyzing the movers and stayers in a population of state bar associations that split into two co-existing forms of organization one primarily reliant on the market and the other primarily dependent on the state we demonstrate that a two-stage transition to a new form can be explained by the complementary interplay of resource dependency and neo-institutional theories. Organizations are more likely to move from reliance on the market to reliance on the state if (1) their market performance has been unsuccessful, (2) states are willing and able to solve organizational problems, (3) organizations are younger and less established, and (4) compelling alternative models have been propagated by moral entrepreneurs and adopted by influential states.

Governing Islamic Finance: Territory, Agency, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Financial Geographies

Abstract: This article examines the governance of Islamic finance in two non-Muslim-majority sites of its expansion, the United States and the United Kingdom. An alternative form of economic rationality is being constructed and practiced across diverse sociospatial contexts to produce what we term cosmopolitan financial geographies. Building from recent debates about territoriality, embeddedness, and relationality in economic geography, we respond to calls for a more complex treatment of agency, developing the concept of cosmopolitan legalities to capture the dynamic multiterritorial, relational governance of Islamic banking and finance (IBF) that melds Western and Islamic financial rules and practices through the embodied religious authority of Shari'a scholars. These complex legalities demonstrate the significance of postcolonial and religious sociospatial contexts in the formation of financial markets suggestive of an evolving postcolonial political economy of “south-driven” alliances in a financial landscape do...