Sustaining extended enterprises as a matter of institutional logics: insights from the railway sector

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the effect of institutional logics on the intended resource coordination and integration in extended enterprises (EEs). Design/methodology/approach The qualitative multiple case study approach collected data from three EEs and their hierarchical organizational context in the restructured and privatized railway sector of the Netherlands by observing 40 meetings, conducting 31 semi-structured interviews and 9 feedback meetings and perusing organizational documents. Findings Performance and professional logics characterized the EEs and their hierarchical organizational context. Aligning these logics failed to support the resource coordination and integration in the EEs because of the logics’ resource-centric nature. The co-creation logic in one of the EEs mitigated this resource centrism by addressing the resource personifications and representations of the professional and performance logics. Business unit representatives having hierarchically overlapping organizational positions supported this change process by offering protection from resource-centric logics. Research limitations/implications The chosen research design limits the generalization of the findings but reveals new scientific and practical insights on the role of institutional logics for sustaining EEs. Practical implications The various EE business-units, but especially their contract and concession authorities, need to realize the crippling effect of resource-centric logics on sustaining an EE. Becoming aware of the resource personifications and representations of these logics can assist in addressing their negative effects. Originality/value No previous studies have empirically investigated the effect of institutional logics on the intended resource coordination and integration in EEs.

Supplying Allies: Political Economy of Coalition Warfare

We outline a framework for understanding variation in cobelligerent resource coordination of money and material. An important feature of coalitional resource procurement is the role played by private firms and market forces. These shape the processes by which cobelligerents facilitate acquisition and distribution. At times, cobelligerents rely on themselves or the unilateral provision of resources from a major power supplier. At other times, cobelligerents pool their resources and create international institutions to coordinate the purchase of material. Our framework demonstrates that to understand the means by which coalitions supply themselves and, in turn, create wartime efficiencies in money and material, one must account for both classic determinants of alliance politics—namely the distribution of power between allies—as well as domestic and transnational market forces that can constrain or enable coalition members’ ability, individually and collectively, to procure war inputs.