Page - (000287) - in Knowledge and Networks

284 participate in any exchange of knowledge, or cooperate in projects. The company was isolated especially from project work and was avoided by all three of the other companies. However, the other members of Comra.de reported that the company was a source of knowledge and imitable concepts and was a target for their own employee-lending. Yet on the whole, the noncompliant firm occupied only a periph- eral position in the network (Fig. 13.2). What was the benefit of a peripheral location in an organized network? The answer is quite simple: The physical proximity resulting from collective location in one building meant that imitation could never be stopped even if communication and collective projects and other work was very slow between the rule-breaker and all others. Therefore, the black sheep’s continued membership let the other mem- bers benefit from the increased visibility and monitoring of new technical and industry-specific developments. If there are regular exchanges between 26 or 27 companies, then you are much more on the ball than if you were to be in the inner city with a team of 15 employees or in a commercial zone. You would never get the same value there. And I certainly don’t mean that negatively, but the value of fast exchanges, including at an employee level, that’s something we have only here in the network. (Interview with a member of the Comra.de corporate network, July 2010) Despite the deviant firm’s opportunism, the other members exploited the advan- tages of physical proximity and organizational membership. The fact that the taboo- breaker still belonged to the network meant that they believed it legitimate for them, too, to observe the company and to imitate its successful practices and solutions without approval. On the whole, the network analysis confirms the sanctions of disapproval detailed in the interviews, which were expressed by soft exclusion from the various forms of internal cooperation rather than by exclusion from membership altogether. The firm was thus forced into structural periphery of its relational activi- ties. Despite the short-term advantage of unfriendly imitation, the violation of net- work conventions must ultimately be viewed as negative on the whole. Breaches of taboos place the culture of cooperation at risk, undermining the cooperative core of a corporate network. In the following section we analyze the mechanisms of friendly imitation, that is, the economic opportunities arising from the combination of con- nectivity and contiguity. Practices of Friendly Imitation Conventions of friendly imitation are based on either approval or even active sup- port of one firm’s reproduction of another firm’s solution. Discussions with network members left no doubt that the different forms of exchange and cooperation were geared to providing other parties with solutions in eventual or immediate exchange for help and advice. The imitation network in Fig. 13.2 documents the results that relationships have for friendly imitation, but it provides no information on the enabling conditions. Network-related statistical methods can be used to investigate J. Glückler and I. Hammer