Paper info

Organizational Inscriptions of Network Pictures: A Meso-Level Analysis

Christina Öberg , Stefanos Mouzas and StephanC. Henneberg

The paper was published at the 25th IMP-conference in Marseille, France in 2009.

This paper deals with manifestations of managerial cognition, thus elaborating on a neglected area in business networks and management. While previous studies have concentrated on business networks from entire companies' or individual persons' perspective, this paper operates on a focal company level (meso-level) and is concerned with how interactive sense-making is represented in organizational artifacts, which in turn aim to guide organizational activities. The paper develops and tests a dimensional model of tangible traces of organizational network pictures, which thereby becomes a means to capture managers' interactive sense-making of a company's network. We found manifestation of managerial cognition in the following areas: systems, processes, budgets, strategy, and organization, which in turn influenced the inclusion/exclusion of interaction partners, the interaction mode, and resource allocation.