Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
sectoral or regional economic activity. This chapter focuses on the inter-i rm sales
partnerships in the organizational i eld of stock photography and uses a survey on
German stock photo agencies for the period between 1989 and 2005. Stock photo-
graphy is an interesting sectoral case since it has been undergoing major technologi-
cal, institutional and organizational change in a very short time (this shift is discussed
in more detail below). The empirical analysis looks at the recent emergence of sales
alliances between picture agencies as the unit of analysis. Strategic alliances are an
organizational strategy to access and share resources, costs and proi ts with partner
organizations. Especially under conditions of increased competition and unstable
market conditions, they render dif erent advantages to individual organizations, such
as i rm survival, performance, imitation and innovation (Brass et al., 2004; Knoke,
2001). A sales partnership, in particular, is a contractual licence agreement, where one
i rm grants the usage right either for an intellectual property-right protected content
to another i rm for a specii ed time and use in return for a royalty payment (Knoke,
2001). Though stock photography has a long tradition in international sales coopera-
tion (Wilkinson, 1997), the alliance behaviour has changed dramatically over the last
ten years. It has changed in quantitative terms because more and more picture agen-
cies seek sales partners; and it has experienced a qualitative change because picture
agencies no longer ally only internationally but they have also started partnering with
agencies in their domestic market. Section 2 discusses some elements of an emerging
theory of network evolution and develops research hypotheses. Section 3 introduces
the business context and the fundamental technological and organizational changes
occurring in the market for still images in recent history. Section 4 documents the
methodology and section 5 presents the i ndings of the empirical analysis before the
chapter closes with some concluding remarks with respect to the emerging project of
an evolutionary economic geography.
2. Network evolution and geography
The essential starting point for any theory about network evolution is the question of
'how do structural dimensions of an interorganizational communication network at
Time 1 af ect the interactions among member organizations - specii cally, their formation
of ties to other organizations - at Time 2?' (Kenis and Knoke, 2002, pp. 277-278). This
question pays attention to inherent conditions of a network rather than external condi-
tions that drive network change. The network trajectory (Kilduf and Tsai, 2003) is an
appropriate concept in the analysis of network evolution, which combines the notions of
evolution, network and geography. It describes a geographically and historically specii c
development path of a network in which the formation and dissolution of ties in earlier
stages generate cumulative propensities for the formation and dissolution of ties in the
future and in which the mechanisms of path-disruption and variation are endogenous
(Glückler, 2007). This perspective explicitly moves beyond the dyadic analysis of single
relations to the analysis of entire networks of relations. A theory of network evolution,
thus, looks at the changes that new ties produce in the existing structure and, conversely,
at the impact that the structure imposes on the formation of these next ties. In a recent,
sophisticated study Powell et al. (2005) explicitly tested a set of alternative hypotheses on
the emergence of new relationships in an expanding network. Following on the network
literature, they focused on a set of hypotheses that they assessed as potential mechanisms
