Networked Business Organizations: Topics for Actionable Research

Abstract

This chapter examines issues of management in network organizational arrangements. The fast changing, complex and heterogeneous field of dynamic organizations prevents us from establishing one all encompassing definition of networks. To this end, we are focusing on specific organizational arrangements under the research agenda of the DOMINO project (IST-2000-29545). Thus, we provide a network’s taxonomy to provide academics and practitioners with deeper understanding in what we call a network. The taxonomy has been developed to classify networks and related organizational arrangements. Therefore, we focus on the management of dynamic inter-organizational network formations to reveal the basic issues that need to be addressed and to provide specific outcomes in the form of actionable results to be used by industrial organizations. The final outcome of this chapter is a management framework that examines networked business organizations from four different research angles and serves practitioners as a roadmap for capturing manifold managerial issues in networked environments.