A friend of a friend? Informal authority, social capital, and networks in telecommunications standard-setting organizations

Meta-organizations are assemblages of autonomous formal organizations with a central goal, but which lack typical instruments of formal authority, like contracts and equity. In this organizational context, how do firms establish informal authority to access other firms' resources and thereby achieve their private strategic goals? Using a novel application of resource dependence theory, this paper applies stochastic actor-based model to examine how firms' informal authority is established and evolves to achieve their strategic goals within the Third Generational Partnership Project (3GPP), the primary global mobile telecommunications standard-setting organization. By using a comprehensive dataset of interfirm collaboration over the 3G and 4G generations, our analysis shows that firms tend to establish mutual dependencies by selecting collaborators who possess social capital (high reputations), but avoid collaborators with political capital (high status) within the interorganizational collaboration network. This research provides new insights into how meta-organizations are internally organized through informal authority, while also extending resource dependence theory to the network-level. It also advances our understanding of the formation of mutual dependencies from an actor-based perspective in an interorganizational collaboration network.