Reconceptualizing Network Change: Robustness and Resilience of Interorganizational Networks

Existing research on interorganizational network dynamics has largely treated network change as gradual, local, and primarily oriented toward private organizational advantage. Yet contemporary cooperative interorganizational systems are highly interconnected across industrial sectors and geographies and are routinely exposed to shocks that simultaneously disable multiple organizations or relationships among them. These shocks stem from pandemics, natural disasters, wars, sanctions, and cascading partner failures, and can rapidly reconfigure whole‑network architectures and undermine collective outcomes. In light of this new reality, we reconceptualize interorganizational networks as loci of frequent, punctuated change at the whole network level, with primary implications for collective outcomes. We develop this reconceptualization through a robustness–resilience lens, defining network robustness as an interorganizational network’s capacity to maintain its collective outcomes in the immediate aftermath of a shock, and network resilience as its capacity to recover and potentially surpass pre‑shock collective outcomes over the longer term. We then outline the theoretical and methodological opportunities that this robustness–resilience perspective opens for the study of network change.