| This study gives attention to sources and outcomes of organizational ties and exchange networks. The research setting is the financial services industry, specifically, investment banking. We analyze the exchange relationships among investment banking firms in the management of corporate equity financing deals from 1980 to 1989. We first suggest a research framework linking market, network, and organizational modes of socioeconomic action. Historical and institutional backgrounds of the industry are presented next. Data on new common stock issues for public companies and the syndicates among investment banking firms were collected from various archival sources. The main body of the thesis consists of three empirical studies based on those data. The first study focuses on stability and reciprocity of organizational ties. The study shows that the stability of cooperative ties an organization maintains with the partners is a positive function of economic opportunities and geographic market advantage, and a negative function of organizational influence, reputation, and structural differentiation. The results also indicate that dyadic reciprocity is influenced positively not only by economic opportunities, resource commitment, and market power, but also by complementary market arenas, comparable levels of economic opportunities, and differences in market power. The second study gives attention to sources of structural positions that organizations hold in their exchange relationships. The niche-based structuration hypothesis was tested with blockmodeling of multiple exchange relations and multinomial logit modeling of structural positions. The results confirm that organizational capabilities and market strategy as key niche elements are bases of organizational positions in exchange networks. The third study concerns the relationship between organizational performance and relational behavior. Loglinear analysis of cooperative deal exchanges was conducted to test performance effects of expansive, popular, and reciprocal strategies in social exchange. The results indicate that expansive strategy leads to better performance than popular strategy, and that the early performance increases both expansiveness and popularity in relational behavior. In conclusion, theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are discussed. |
