In this paper, we focus on limited and joint-stock active companies operating between 2008 and 2016 within the Brescian manufacturing system (n=7,619). After processing data for 1,047 firm-level agreements, we examined the impact of economic and organisational features on companies' decentralised bargaining activity. In a first probit model, the purely economic-financial variables included do not explain company bargaining behaviour. However, a second probit model with only organisational variables shows that the largest and longest lasting companies were more likely to sign new agreements. In addition, while firm bargaining history tended to increase the likelihood of an agreement being signed, family-type governance had the opposite effect. Potential explanations of these findings are discussed, mainly in consideration of the widespread diffusion of a decentralised bargaining model based on family-type ownership and medium-small corporate dimensional scale.

IntroduzioneIl tema della contrattazione decentrata di secondo livello (aziendale e/o territoriale) è di estrema attualità nel dibattito attuale.Un approccio particolarmente significativo considera congiuntamente la contrattazione a livello aziendaleo più in generale relazioni sindacali aziendali avanzatee l'intensità di introduzione delle cosiddette HPWPS -High Performance Work Practices, vale a dire le pratiche di gestione del lavoro associabili e/o determinanti prestazioni più elevate a livello d'impresa.La letteratura internazionale e nazionale (Albertini e Leoni, 2009; Croucher e Rizov, 2009) ha evidenziato con grande chiarezza come la introduzione di pratiche innovative richieda come pre-condizione un quadro di buone relazioni industriali a livello d'impresa.In altre parole, pratiche volte al coinvolgimento e la partecipazione dei lavoratori, allo sviluppo ed alla formazione di competenze, alla flessibilità organizzativa ed al decentramento decisionale (Cappelli e Neumark, 2001) per essere efficacemente introdotte e adottate richiedono un contesto aziendale favorevole caratterizzato da relazioni industriali avanzate.A monte di questo approccio vi è la convinzione che la produttività del lavoro e la performace d'impresa dipenderebbero fortemente dalla stretta complementarità tra modelli organizzativi, pratiche di gestione del lavoro e nuove tecnologie utilizzate.

In this article, we address the question of institutional and organizational change through the start-up of new ventures. Following the institutional entrepreneurship theory, we examine the process of divergent change and the kinds of institutional work enabling entrepreneurs operating in a peripheral social position of mature fields to challenge the existing status quo. We argue that the start-up of new organizations can be an opportunity for repositioning existing traditional entrepreneurial capabilities by combining them with additional and complementary competences towards new institutional logics. Building on an in-depth longitudinal case study of a group of Italian small and medium-sized enterprises – acting intentionally as a community for innovation – we highlight the contextual conditions and the implementing factors allowing this type of institutional entrepreneurship. Our study makes two main contributions. First, we try to fill the gap with existing research mostly focused on dominant organizations, by showing how institutional entrepreneurship can be implemented by low-status organizations, within highly institutionalized fields. Second, we shed light on the process implementing new divergent organizational forms, by bridging established mature firms with new innovative fields.

Over the last few decades, the need for small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) to rely on networking to get access to innovation and larger knowledge bases has become evident. This paper analyzes the birth and evolution of an Italian innovation community created by a group of SMEs searching for innovation. Coming from quite different fields, these SMEs converged around a challenging project in the field of biomedical and rehabilitation devices. The aim of the paper is twofold: (1) to investigate what type of competences and tasks have to be accomplished to effectively manage an innovation community (IC) and what managerial roles (promotors) emerge by crossing competences and tasks; and (2) to what extent community members' absorptive capacity (ACAP) influences their ability to acquire and exploit innovation generated by the community. Using an in‐depth longitudinal case study analysis, we identified three different stages in community evolution. We also studied which promotors' roles that emerged in each stage and determined their relationship both between each other and to community performance. Furthermore, we investigated to what extent an existing knowledge base in a specific domain and previous experiences in networking influenced community members' ability to exploit innovation. We found that a specific correspondence among competences and tasks is needed to guarantee community performance and that promotors should interact among themselves to enable the community to reach its goal. Concerning ACAP, we found that prior experience and familiarity in networking are not predictive of new knowledge exploitation.

Networking can be considered the organizational support to the learning process. The paper defines a new coordination process of the division of labour between autonomous actors and organizations, beyond the market and the hierarchical processes. Networking by means of “interactive communication” is becoming increasingly the typical organizational process in post-fordism which allows new, far-reaching, opportunities in the division of cognitive labour. The discussion of the process of exploration and exploitation of knowledge is based on two analytical dimensions: (a) the types of knowledge shared by organizations and (b) the types of roles played by different actor networks. The analytical framework shows how different specialized actors and organizations, with different tasks, are complementary as regards the effectiveness of the networking (specialists, systemists, connectors and meta-organizers). The empirical evidence – concerning the evolution of the industrial districts of the North–East of Italy towards the network form – seems to support the conceptual approach adopted.

A case-study of the R&D networking activities of Glare Group Research was carried out between June and November 1993. Different types of networking situation were identified using a simple 2x2 matrix - the 'networking uncertainty map'. This paper describes the background to Glaxo's R&D networking activities, introduces and illustrates the uncertainty map and then suggests the implications of each type of network. There are implications in general for R&D management and more specifically for the management of human resources in R&D. Managers might easily apply the uncertainty map to their own R&D networking situations.