Interorganizational Design and Performance of Economic Development Systems
Building and managing interorganizational relationships is a strategic imperative for private and public organizations alike. However, our understanding of how to design and administer these relationships is limited because we don’t fully comprehend the link between interorganizational design and performance at the system-level. Research on organizational networks (Powell et al, 2005) and institutional fields (Zeitsma et al, 2017) generally seeks to explain the diversity of interorganizational forms, rather than assess their comparative efficacy or performance. On the other hand, the performance of interorganizational structures is a central concern in strategy and management research, but it tends to be viewed from the perspective of a single focal firm rather than at the system-level (Adner and Kapoor, 2010; Kapoor, 2018; Jacobides, 2018).
Thus, I ask: how does interorganizational design relate to performance at the system-level over time? I explore this question in the context of economic development—a domain of activity that extends across different organizations and institutions (including government agencies, private companies, non-profits, community colleges, philanthropies, and more) and different levels of jurisdiction (local, county, district, state, regional, and federal level). Drawing on historical methods and case studies of economic development systems in 4 U.S. commuting zones, I trace how interorganizational structures emerge and evolve alongside a set of economic performance variables over the period of 1980-2022. I will present preliminary hypotheses to explain how the design of economic development systems relates to local economies’ ability to recover from an economic shock.