Strategia, reti di imprese e capacità relazionali

[Autom. eng. transl.] Organizations act within a web of continuously evolving relationships that, while generating constraints on intentional action, also provides opportunities and resources. Incorporating the contribution offered by the theory of embeddedness on the most recent developments in strategy studies in a resource-based key, this volume discusses the determinants of competitive advantage in a perspective that favors the role of that complex interweaving of interpersonal and inter-organizational relations that is underlying. to strategic behavior and business performance. It shows that strategies with a high relational intensity can lead to truly sustainable competitive advantages because they are based on the ability of relationships to guarantee the retrieval and / or generation of resources, above all of knowledge, necessary to activate processes of co-evolution between the competence business base and the dynamics of environmental variables. Particular attention is paid to the role played in this sense by inter-organizational collaboration, in the form of strategic alliances and business networks, whose growing diffusion is at the origin of the progressive shift from a competition between single companies to a network competition, which requires the development of specific organizational skills. The analysis of the profile of the central enterprises, which make use in a deliberate and systematic way of the support offered by inter-company relational architectures for the performance of activities and processes of strategic importance, allows the relational abilities necessary for the strategic governance of the business networks to emerge. .