STRATEGIC NETWORKS Ranjay Gulati, Nitin Nohria, Akbar Zaheer ...

To show the promise of comprehending strategic networks, we highlightedseveral areas where such an understanding can complement and extend traditionalstrategy frameworks and perspectives. For instance, we showed how the overall networkstructure of an industry that can be analyzed by considering such elements as its density,or the extent to which the industry is more or less constrained in its exchange relationswith other upstream or downstream industries, and these can be an important complementto traditional models that have focused on concentration or other measures of marketpower. For strategy scholars who focus on the industry as their unit of analysis, webelieve a network perspective can add an important new dimension to explore differencesin profitability across industries.For strategy scholars whose interests center on positioning within an industry as aunit of analysis, we suggest that in addition to using similarities in firm attributes such asscale, scope and technology in constructing strategic groups, they should also considersimilarities among firms in relational space. Firms that are in the same clique or arestructurally equivalent may behave similarly and enjoy similar returns. An interestingresearch question would be to examine whether groups defined on the basis of attributesoverlap with those defined on the basis of relational similarities. It would also beinteresting to study whether firm conduct and performance was more or less contingenton these different ways of grouping.A network perspective can also provide new insights for strategy scholars who areproponents of a resource-based view of the firm. A comprehensive view of a firm’s rent-23