Enterprise Network Theory: Paradigm Of A New Interpretation Of Exploration

With the economic globalization and fast advancement of technology, more and more firms began to realize that it is difficult to exist or develop totally on its own since the competition in the market place is becoming more and more severe. Since 1980s, some western firms, especially transnational corporations, began to strategically rearrange their competitive relationships and changed from contradictory competition to large-scale cooperative competition. Organizational forms such as joint ventures, strategic alliances and supply chain partnership have become core strategies for firms to share resource and to coordinate strategy. This not only goes beyond the ideas of absolute exclusion and contradictory competition but also abandons the idea of selfish cooperation. The author includes all these new organizational forms into a unanimous concept - INTERFIRM NETWORK - and tries to give a new interpretation through a systematical and deep research.The thesis can be developed into 7 chapters. The first chapter is Introduction and it gives a general description about the research background, the significance, the structure and the methodology of the thesis. The second chapter is about Network Basis. On the basis of a clear and concrete conception about what is interfirm network, this part mainly discusses the characteristics and special coordinative rules of interfirm network compared with absolute market and hierarchy. Then, I try to give an economics analysis on the regulation structure of interfirm network. The third chapter is Network Motivation and the Comparison of different forms. This part makes a careful analysis about the motivations to cooperate among firms and compares different forms of interfirm network. Here, I discuss the forms from three levels; the relationships and differences among those different forms are also involved. The fourth chapter is about Network Analysis Basis. In this chapter, I sum up how network was originated and talk about the process of its growth from the viewpoint of theory development. Some basic concepts are illustrated here. The important advocates of two network analysts,Emerson and Cook, are also introduced. Social Capital and Social Embeddedness is the main content of the fifth chapter of the paper. This part widens the view of traditional resource by introducing the concept of Network Resource. After demonstrating what is "social capital" and how the idea of "embeddedness" came into being, the author talk about the embeddedness of interfirm network, trying to answer how to achieve "best embeddedness". The differences among various forms of embeddedness and their relationships with performance are also involved in this part. The sixth chapter is about Network Governance. In this chapter, the author gives a systematic discussion about the concept of network governance and the corresponding governance conditions, and then provides an institutional analysis framework. As the basis of the cooperation among firms, trust is necessary for the development of the network. Taking a comparative perspective, the author presents a new interpretation of trust from three dimensions: cognition, emotion and behavior. And at last, from the interactive theory in sociology point of view, we present a new way and a new methodology basis to probe into the coordination among firms in network. The seventh chapter, which is also the last chapter, is about the Practice and Development of Interfirm Network. In this chapter, the trends and the development bases of interfirm network are summarized. Taking medium-small firms as an example, I illustrate the life cycle of networks and the network characteristics in various phases. I also discuss the mode of interfirm networks and its development. The last but not the least important part is a penetrating analysis about knowledge creation in interfirm networks from the viewpoints of both network culture and network learning.