Organizational dynamic embeddedness and external shocks: The impact of financial and recession crises in strategic networks of the global pharmaceutical industry

We analyze the global pharmaceutical industry network using a unique database that covers strategic transactions (i.e., alliance, financing and acquisition collaborations) for the top 90 global pharmaceutical firms and their ego‐network partnerships totaling 4735 members during 1991–2012. The article explores insights on dynamic embeddedness analysis under network perturbations by exploring core and full networks' behavior during the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the subsequent global and Eurozone recessions of 2009–2012. We introduce and test literature grounded hypotheses as well as report network visualizations and nonparametric tests that reveal important discrepancies in both network types before and after the financial crisis offset. We observe that firms in core and full networks behave differently, with smaller top pharmaceutical firms of core networks particularly being affected by the crises, potentially due to a collaboration reduction with bigger top pharmaceuticals. On the other hand, big pharmaceuticals in full networks maintain their centrality position as a possible consequence of their strategic collaborations not only with other similarly sized firms but also due to their connections with subsidiaries and other private entities present in the total sample. Our results confirm the significant dynamicity reduction during financial crisis and recession periods for core and full networks, and highlight the importance that exogenous factors as well as network types play in centrality‐based dynamic longitudinal network analysis. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 21: 602–621, 2016