Engineered temporary networks : Effects of control and temporality on inter-organizational interaction

Sammanfattning: The world is facing a growing threat of antibiotic resistance. The development of new antibiotics is of utmost importance; otherwise, we go back to the pre-antibiotic era where common infections become life-threatening. Despite this need for new antibiotics, a market failure is hampering its development. To mitigate this market failure, policy makers have initiated inter-organizational R&D projects for antibiotic development. These projects involve different actors, are intentionally created, and have clearly defined objectives, as well as duration, for developing new antibiotics. These initiatives can be seen as engineered temporary networks. Engineered temporary networks need to be managed in order to avoid the risk of not reaching the network objectives. Managing these networks is a matter of formally controlling the interaction among the organizations involved in the networks, making sure that the network proceeds toward its objectives. The aim of this thesis is to understand the effects of formal control mechanisms used to engineer a temporary network on inter-organizational interaction, with a special focus on temporality. The thesis uses a case study of ENABLE, an engineered temporary network initiated by the EU to develop a specific set of antibiotics. The formal control mechanisms are identified, including the use of temporality as a formal control mechanism. The effects of the control mechanisms are analyzed on the dyadic and network levels, for example, in terms of e.g., heterogeneity, interdependence, and co-evolution, on the activity, resource, and actor layers in line with the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) perspective. The formal control mechanisms are grouped into five categories (mobilization, coordination, cooperation, performance, and temporality), highlighting key aspects of engineered temporary networks to be controlled. The thesis also identifies differences between emergent networks and engineered temporary networks in how interaction is structured and develops over time. In contrast to emergent networks where inter-organizational interaction occurs freely and has agency in organizing and structuring the network, it is formal control that organizes and structures engineered temporary networks, while the agency of interaction is limited. The thesis contributes to the literature on industrial networks and network management, explicitly highlighting the use of formal control and its effects on inter-organizational interaction.