It's the Connections: The Network Perspective in Interorganizational Research

The application of social network analysis to interorganizational contexts has seen an explosion of interest in the past several years. We argue that not only does the network or structural perspective add explanatory power to scholarly understanding of organizations' behavior and outcomes, but that it expands the universe of observed phenomena from an autonomous to a relational view for studying and explaining organizational action and outcomes. We develop an organizing framework based on three levels of network analysis (the dyad, the ego, and the whole network) and four theoretical mechanisms (resource access, trust, power/control, and signaling) to organize and review the key findings and debates in the interorganizational network literature. We point to avenues for future research based on the linkages across the boxes in our framework, gaps in the framework, and finally, extensions beyond the framework.