Network Organizations: Determinants of Inter-Organizational Cooperation

Virtual And Network Organizations

The network is a concept that has become widespread in technology, social sciences, and everyday colloquial language too. It is a collection of elements interconnected by relationships and connections of various scope. In the management literature, three meanings are distinguished for the economic network. They are: the subject of management science research, the method of coordinating the cooperation activities undertaken and the form of organization itself (Provan, Human, 2000). The concept of network organization has not been clearly defined in the management literature. It can even be assumed that due to the unprecedented speed of changes in the network organizations themselves, this definition will be subject to further modifications. However, the foundation for a whole series of concepts introduced to illustrate the network phenomenon will be the description of the network structure in classical theory of graphs. A graph is a set of vertices that can be connected by edges such that each edge ends and starts at a vertex. The sciences of organization and management adapted the graph model to their own needs, and here the nodes are organizations that undertake cooperative relations, and the connections between them are various types of flows between them. In organizations with a network structure, nodes are organizations, teams or individual collaborators and relationships are created by connections between nodes. Building these relationships is a particularly difficult challenge, as it covers not only technical but also social aspects. Its aim is to fully coordinate the cooperation of network members. It also means defining the rules of cooperation and creating a culture of trust between partners (Czakon & Kawa, 2018; Czakon, Klimas & Mariani, 2019; Afflerbach, 2020).