Collaboration of organizations reshapes traditional managerial practices and creates new inter-organizational contexts for strategy, coordination and control, information and knowledge management. Heralded as organizational forms of the future, networks are at the same time fragile and precarious organizational arrangements, which regularly fail. In order to investigate the new realities created by technology-enabled forms of network organizations and to address the emerging managerial challenges, this book introduces an integrative view on inter-firm network management. Centred on a network life cycle perspective, strategic, economic and relational facets of business networking are explored. The network management framework is illustrated onto a broad range of European inter-firm network examples in various industries rendering insights for new management practices.

Social networks surround us. They are as diverse as a local community trying to help solve a neighborhood crime, a firm wondering how to streamline decision making, or a terrorist cell figuring out how to plan an attack without central coordination. This groundbreaking book explores social networks in formal and informal organizations, using a combination of approaches from social psychology, I/O psychology, organization/management science, social learning, and helping skills. A quantum advance over conventional social network analysis, Dynamic Network Theory examines how social networks articulate goals and generate social capital at various levels. Geared for researchers and practitioners, Dynamic Network Theory is also written for graduate students and advanced undergraduate students. Appendixes include primers on designing and analyzing dynamic network charts.

An all-inclusive introduction to this revolutionary technology, presenting the key research issues and state-of-the-art design, analysis, and optimization techniques.

Digital networking technologies are empowering organizations to form dynamic networks, generating exceptional or ‘smart’ results. These Smart Business Networks (SBNs) enable individual organizations to compete more effectively and to respond better to a changing world. This idea attracted a diverse group of academic scholars and business professionals to Beijing from May 19-23, 2008, hosted by Tsinghua University. They discovered new ways to manage network resources, operate business processes across a network, create a business operations platform, understand the importance of network position and the smart mastering of technology. Effective managers, they concluded, must have a firm understanding of these fundamental network concepts in order to orchestrate the networks of the future. This book presents the results of an intense and energizing event which resulted in new theoretical foundations and practical insights.