IMO MORSe Seminar: Frederic Godart

 

Title: Mobility Networks and Institutional Change: How Parisian Haute Couture Moved into Ready-to-Wear, 1945-1973

 

Abstract: Interorganizational personnel mobility networks have been shown to impact various organizational outcomes, from creativity to survival. So far, however, their effect on large-scale phenomena such as institutional change has not been explored. Making a distinction between outward ties when employees go from the focal organization to other organizations, and inward ties when they come from the outside to the focal organization, we argue that such change is driven initially by networks with an outward orientation (and the information and influence that go with it), but it is then the inward networks, in particular with organizations having already adopted the change, that transfer the needed skills and competences. We conducted a key personnel mobility network analysis of the diffusion of ready-to-wear in French fashion between 1945 and 1973. This change, originating in the United States, displaced traditional custom-made haute couture as the most significant activity in French fashion, and was later recast as prêt-à-porter, an quintessentially French phenomenon.