Learning by doing in social networks : North American automotive engine plants, 1995--2006

Abstract

This dissertation is an academic attempt to make answers to a couple of research questions: What are the potential factors to internally affect the effectiveness of organizations' learning by doing activities and how do the network characteristics of organizations influence the effects of those internal factors on the effectiveness of learning by doing? By using the automobile engine manufacturing plants in North America 1995-2006 as the research context, this study suggests three factors to influence the effectiveness of learning by doing: (1) the change of part-time worker ratio, (2) the in-house manufacturing ratio, and (3) the failure of quality control. To measure the effectiveness of learning by doing, this study uses the extent to which productivity is enhanced by following the convention of organizational learning perspectives. In addition to the direct effects of the internal factors, this study pays attention to the interaction effects of the network properties of engine plants and each internal factor on the effectiveness of learning by doing in order to examine the influence of the networks in which engine plants are embedded. The network properties of engine plants used in this study are degree centrality and closeness centrality, which are obtained from the engine plants' production-based networks. The findings show that both the increase of the part-time worker ratio and the high in-house manufacturing ratio negatively affect the productivity enhancement and that those negative effects are mitigated when plants have high centralities in networks. Intriguingly, this study reports that plants with unsuccessful quality control tend to focus more on productivity enhancement, but such tendency is likely to be distracted by the high extent of centrality due to the contingency of knowledge irrelevance. This study makes at least two contributions to the extant literature of learning by doing: It first empirically examines the effects of three internal factors on the effectiveness of learning by doing based on in-depth literature review, while there are few empirical studies that did so. It also expands the research areas of learning by doing by investigating the effects of the network features of organizations on the effectiveness of learning by doing.