IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wsi/ijimxx/v02y1998i02ns1363919698000079.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

"Swimming Around in Their Own Ponds": The Weakness of Strong Ties in Developing Innovative Practices

Author

Listed:
  • Denise Fletcher

    (Nottingham Business School, The Nottingham Trent University, Burton Street, Nottingham NG1 3BU, UK)

Abstract

This paper identifies how strong ties that have been nurtured and institutionalised over a number of years can be more inhibitive in generating innovation processes in organisations than in mobilising them. Close attention is given to sentiment and friendship relations within a small family firm to highlight how these ties are mobilised to obstruct innovative practices. A network approach is adopted to identify how individuals within the company attribute value and meaning to the different interactions they have with colleagues in the company. It is proposed that this view of organisational networks provides valuable insights into the nurture and embedment of workplace values and explains why, in some companies, there are difficulties in adopting innovative practices.

Suggested Citation

  • Denise Fletcher, 1998. ""Swimming Around in Their Own Ponds": The Weakness of Strong Ties in Developing Innovative Practices," International Journal of Innovation Management (ijim), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 2(02), pages 137-159.
  • Handle: RePEc:wsi:ijimxx:v:02:y:1998:i:02:n:s1363919698000079
    DOI: 10.1142/S1363919698000079
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S1363919698000079
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1142/S1363919698000079?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Donald O. Wilson & John E. Ettlie, 2018. "Boundary Spanning, Group Heterogeneity and Engineering Project Performance," International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management (IJITM), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 15(06), pages 1-35, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wsi:ijimxx:v:02:y:1998:i:02:n:s1363919698000079. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tai Tone Lim (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.worldscinet.com/ijim/ijim.shtml .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.