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Many key activities in both the public and private sectors today occur in interorganizational networks, involving high interdependence among otherwise autonomous agencies. Miles and Snow outline a special form of such systerms called the "dynamic network. "It is characterized by vertical disaggregation, a flexible governance structure resembling a market mechanism, a single strategy maker in the role of a "broker, " and shared information among members. The combination of these features distinguishes the dynamic network from other interorganizational systems. Miles and Snow claim their model is useful in both public and private settings. However, applications are, so far, limited to the private sector. Utilizing six comprehensive case studies, we examine the dynamic network model in public service delivery. New propositions are developed concerning structure and agency conduct in public interorganizational systems.

The authors test whether acquisitions and divestitures are related to environmental uncertainty and diversification strategy. Drawing from transaction cost economics, they predicted that increases in environmental uncertainty would reduce a company's ability to manage its subsidiaries efficiently and would lead to divestiture. Conversely, they predicted that decreases in environmental uncertainty would enable a company to manage its subsidiaries more efficiently and would lead to acquisition. Those predictions were expected to be strongest for firms with intermediate levels of diversification, as such firms are believed to be the most difficult to manage efficiently. Repeated measures analyses of a panel of 164 Fortune 500 companies supported the predictions for highly diversified firms (e.g., unrelated businesses) only. Less diversified firms reacted to increases in uncertainty by acquiring and to decreases in uncertainty by divesting. The results suggest that the relationship between diversification strategy and portfolio restructuring depends on environmental uncertainty. In addition, the study findings imply that there may be limits in the hierarchy's governance efficiency in relation to market modes and that those limits may be affected by environmental uncertainty and diversification strategy.

Technology champions are members of organizations presenting new technology to fellow members who are potential users. They are widely accepted as instrumental in many implementation settings. In the perspective that dominates the current literature, champions are allied with outside technology, and users are slow to adopt innovation. Much effort has gone into describing traits of champions and solving problems in the process of getting users to accept the new technology. This focus emphasizes one particular view of the champion role, and leads to a constrained set of alternatives to manage technology championing. We propose instead that champions can be seen as agents of potential users, and implementation described in terms of constructs familiar in the agency model. This approach challenges some fundamental premises in the existing literature and introduces new propositions to the research on technology champions. They address alignment of self-interest between champions and users, implicit contracts, incentives and penalties, risk-bearing, and performance evaluation.