Collaboration and social capital in meta-organisations: bonding or bridging?

Abstract

ABSTRACT How do firms collaborate to achieve their strategic goals within inter-organisational settings? Inter-firm collaboration is a double-edge sword – it helps firms to obtain external resources, but it also increases risks of knowledge spillovers with competitors. Normally, spillover risks are reduced through formal contracting. However, meta-organisations, like standard-setting organisations, lack formal contracts, meaning that firms often rely on social capital to offset transaction costs and opportunism. This paper applies theories of social capital to explain inter-firm collaboration within the meta-organisational environment of 3GPP (Third Generational Partnership Project) – the primary global mobile telecommunications standard-setting organisation. It utilises a stochastic actor-based model and a comprehensive collaboration dataset from the 3G to 4G eras to examine the mechanism of collaboration. We find that firms are more likely to choose partner firms based on the ‘bonding’ view of social capital, rather than the ‘bridging’ view. The paper advances research on collaboration mechanism within meta-organisation, while also contributing to social capital theory in emphasising the importance of the bonding view of social capital under conditions when no formal contracts are available.