Political Perspectives on Inter-organizational Networks

This article examines political perspectives on inter-organizational relationships, which refer primarily to the disciplines of political science and political sociology and their diverse approaches to theorizing and empirically investigating relationships among organizations. It reviews recent work in both political science and political sociology on a broad range of topics, including political institutions and governance, voting and social movement participation, social capital formation, public policy-making and implementation, and systems of political opportunity and influence. The common thread weaving together these diverse topics is social network analysis, which explains how the structure of interactions connecting political actors affects perceptions, attitudes, and actions, and in turn, how political behaviours transform network structures. Although one can draw ideas from general theories of social networks and organizational behaviour, the specific objective of this article is to demonstrate how those concepts and propositions help in better understanding and explanation of the political relationships among organizations.