In line with international management scholars, various streams of organization literature recently developed an interest in applying network concepts to the study of organizational issues. Thereby, quite a number of different social objects — from groups to societies — have been described in network terms. Too often, however, the term was used to describe a normative pattern rather than being applied in tradition of the well established network literature. In a recent attempt to consolidate the state of the art in network research, Nohria formulated the threat that the network could become just another tired metaphor: “the indiscriminate proliferation of the network concept threatens to relegate it to the status of an evocative metaphor, applied so loosely that it ceases to mean anything” (1992: 3).