Page - (000277) - in Knowledge and Networks

274 sidered illegitimate by the originator of the idea or practice, it is still legal as long as it does not violate any intellectual property rights. In these situations firms cannot influence imitation and the use of their own knowledge by other organizations. In open competition and rivalry, unfriendly imitations do not violate any convention pertaining to cooperation, loyalty, or reciprocity, and firms simply have to accept that fact as a general environmental condition. By contrast, unfriendly imitation is socially forbidden in cooperative relation- ships. However, the existence of cooperative or trusting relationships between members of a network reinforces the risk of unfriendly imitation. If actors trust in the cooperation and the joint work in which they are engaging, they are inclined to disclose much more about themselves than they would to competing firms with which they have no cooperative relationship. As more information is discovered, the risk of unfriendly imitation thus becomes greater in cooperative relationships than in open competition. This argument has its roots in the observation that the greatest damage from abuse can only arise under conditions of trust (Granovetter, 1985). Within cooperative relationships the gravity of this potential harm has institutional- ized unfriendly imitation as a taboo that should not be broken given the prevailing conventions. The Geography of Interfirm Relationships The importance of the processes described above for cooperative and rival learning varies according to the underlying conditions for cooperation. The geographic con- text, for instance, figures prominently in rival learning in particular, affecting the capacity to exploit opportunities for imitation. The following section distinguishes between three geographic situations—clusters, organized networks, and the special form of colocated network organizations—bearing on interfirm relations that play a key role in discussing cooperative and rival learning (Fig. 13.1). Fig. 13.1 Geographic organization of cooperation: Clusters, organized networks, and colocated network organizations (From Glückler et al. (2012, p. 168). Reprinted with permission of Springer) J. Glückler and I. Hammer