Studying Supply Chains from a Social Network Perspective (Report‪)‬

Macro-organizational theory has now fully embraced network analysis, and the volume of research on networks and organizations is staggering (Brass, Galaskiewicz, Greve and Tsai 2004). Students of human service organizations and corporate interlocks carried out the pioneering work on the topic, and Tichy Tushman and Fombrun (1979) is often cited as the first management article to articulate a network approach, but it was not until the late 1980s and 1990s, with the work of Burt (1983), Granovetter (1985), Galaskiewicz and Wasserman (1989), Mizruchi (1989), Powell (1990), Burt (1992), Gulati (1995), Uzzi (1997), and many others on networks among business organizations, did the field "take off." Before addressing questions about how network analysis relates to interdisciplinary supply chain research, I want to make some distinctions that, I believe, will clarify some points. First, there is an important difference between those who study networks as a collection of arcs and nodes and focus on the formal properties of different configurations and those who study social networks. The latter have usefully drawn on formal theory, but the explanations for why networks benefit nodes or why networks change or why some kinds of networks are more effective than others are based, for the most part, on theories derived from behavioral psychology, e.g., balance theory, exchange theory, social comparison theory, social contagion theory, etc. (Galaskiewicz 2007). That is, researchers have taken micro theories of behavior and have tested them using organizations as the units of analysis and network methodology. This type of social network analysis is what I will focus on here.