MODELING THE PERSISTENCE OF ORGANIZATIONS IN AN EMERGING FIELD - THE CASE OF HEPATITIS-C

This paper explores the persistence of research organizations in their efforts to participate in the development of an emerging field of sci ence and technology. Persistence is operationalized as the ongoing con tribution of a research organization to knowledge creation and diffusi on. In particular, we relate the position of a research organization i n a network of R & D collaborations to its ongoing contribution to kno wledge development, using data on 991 research organizations in the fi eld of hepatitis C over the period 1979-1992/3. Event-history modeling is used to explore the influence of sociometric time-varying covariat es on organizational contribution-spans. The analytical results suppor t the hypothesis that network embeddedness is a significant determinan t of organizational persistence in an emerging field. More specificall y, the position of a research organization in a network of collaborati ve R & D activities (rather than the number of network partners or col laborative relationships) has a significant and positive influence on its ongoing contribution to the field.