Cooperative and Instrumental Stakeholder Networks: A Case Analysis of Two Urban Neighborhoods

Drawing on scholarship from resource dependency, social network analysis, trust, and institutional theories, we present a model that describes the factors that shape relationships among organizations and their stakeholders. We propose that networks comprised by companies and their stakeholders can be primarily cooperative or opportunistic in character. The qualities of the organizations in the network as well as the relationships and structure of those relationships determin whether or not the resulting network can be characterized as cooperative or opportunistic. We illustrate the model by comparing and contrasting the stakeholder networks of two neighborhood development projects.