Power and Influence: The Effects of Embeddedness on Cooperative Strategic Decision Making

This dissertation investigates whether and why social structure influences cooperative organizational strategic decision making in an international relations context, and in particular, similar voting in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). The economic and institutional embeddedness of organizations which are operationalized using network concepts are posited as and found to be influences. Additionally, nested institutional embeddedness is investigated in an inter-organizational setting. Based on a sensitivity analysis, nested organizational embeddedness can potentially have both negative and positive effects. Multiple issues and network methodology combined with an enormous and varied data set offer a wide-range of future research opportunities. More specifically, trade, military alliances, diplomatic visits, and two-mode International Government Organizational (IGO) networks affect voting behaviour in the UNGA due to power and influence relationships that demand or encourage organizational level reciprocity, either as vote buying in backroom bargaining situations or for compliance reasons; maintaining the nation’s good reputation is of importance in international relations. Each type of inter-organizational network involves an interesting theoretical twist that makes it worth researching and while theory testing is the primary objective, outcomes include practical implications for negotiators. Finally, an advantageous data set offers an excellent context for unique and successful testing of embeddedness view concepts in tighter causal relationships compared to other studies that observe performance rather than decision outcomes. Moreover, the methodological approach is a demonstration of how to deal with a multi-faceted econometric challenge.