HURST, RICHARD SHIELDS; PHD

                         MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY, 1985
 
                         SOCIOLOGY, SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND DEVELOPMENT (0700)
 

                         The research undertaken in this study attempts to uncover the determinants of human service agency
                         interorganizational network cooperation and competition. Using an open-systems resource dependency
                         model to encompass and explain determinants of interorganizational cooperation and competition, the
                         theoretical scope of this study addresses several hypothesized determinants residing at four distinct
                         levels of analysis; the individual, intraorganizational, interorganizational, and ecological level of analysis.
                         In addition, this study makes use of both longitudinal and case study comparisons between two human
                         service networks in an effort to discern both similar and dissimilar network structural factors and
                         mechanisms, and how those factors and mechanisms change and affect cooperative and competitive
                         interorganizational relationships. The data were collected from face-to-face scheduled interviews with
                         nearly all human service agency directors from two medium-sized cities (population around 100,000),
                         Lansing and Kalamazoo, Michigan. The subsequent analysis of the data was guided by a more recent
                         paradigm in sociology called social network analysis. In this perspective the analytic focus centers on the
                         relational/positional consequences of social actors' interorganizational network behavior, rather than on
                         particular attributes or attitudes of social actors. The analysis of the data in this study, then, used
                         procedures and techniques that directly focus on interorganizational relationships themselves. Research
                         results from this study show that individual perceptions or attitudes towards interorganizational
                         cooperation and competition, and intraorganizational factors, such as the extent of internal staff conflict
                         and the impact of internal/external influence over decision-making, explain very little regarding increases
                         or decreases in the extent of interorganizational cooperative and competitive network linkages.
                         Organizational size, however, was found to be the best predictor of cooperative interorganizational
                         linkages, and organizational age was found to be the best predictor of interorganizational competitive
                         linkages--but only for the 1979 study. In addition, it was found that the extent of cooperative
                         interorganizational relationships a human service organization had in 1972 was the best predictor of the
                         extent of cooperative interorganizational relationships it had in 1979. In contrast, no clear longitudinal
                         determinants of the extent of competitive interorganizational relationships were found in either
                         community.

Social Systems Simulation Group P.O. Box 6904 San Diego, CA  92166-0904 Roland Werner, Principal Phone/FAX  (619) 660-1603