The article argues that organizational sociology would do well to revisit James March's famed imagery of the business firm as a political coalition in light of today's decentralized production regimes. Specifically, we show that the increased tendency of firms to coordinate the design and making...

This paper casts light on the role of initial code release for providing coordination of joint search processes, i.e., search processes that involve several agents who search together. We develop hypotheses about the role of initial code release for providing coordination, and for whether...

Organizational and sociological research dealing with network governance has mainly focused on network advantages rather than on their problems or dysfunctionalities. This left partially unexplored the field of network failure. Even if some early attempts at explicitly theorizing network...

This paper, building on R&D integration and improvisation literature, explores how firms organize to jointly develop common product platforms if their integration process is still in progress. In order to address our exploratory research question, we draw on a unique set of empirical data...

This paper considers the trade-off between leveraging external sources of innovation by outsourcing design and engineering activities and the ability to develop internal product development competences. The trade-off arises because the division of labor within and across firms' boundaries has a...

This paper considers the trade-off between leveraging external sources of innovation by outsourcing design and engineering activities and the ability to develop internal product development competences. The trade-off arises because the division of labor within and across firms' boundaries has a...

Firms that develop complex products have a strong incentive to leverage the suppliers’ specialized knowledge. On the other hand, firms are often confronted with a trade-off between the benefits of leveraging external sources of innovation and the benefits of competence accumulation provided by...

Firms are often confronted with the need of changing their organizational routines. This might follow or trigger a change in their organizational identity. The aim of this paper is twofold: show why understanding the co-evolution of organizational routines and identity is important for...

This study explores the evolution of the knowledge base of the dominant Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in the global automotive industry. Using data on patent families, we reconstruct and analyze their innovative portfolio in the period 1990-2014. The analysis documents experimentation...

Organizational and sociological research dealing with network governance has mainly focused on network advantages rather than on their problems or dysfunctionalities. This left partially unexplored the field of network failure. Even if some early attempts at explicitly theorizing network...