Broadening the Concept of Brokerage: An Integrative Organizing Framework

Brokerage processes in organizations are pervasive, diverse, and consequential. Challenging and complementing prevailing models, we conceptualize brokerage as a social influence process through which organizational actors shape others’ interactions and relationships. Building on interdependence theory, we present a novel organizing framework that identifies distinct functional forms of brokerage by comparing the nature of interdependence between alters before versus after ego engaged in brokerage. We augment structural and egocentric perspectives by offering a process-oriented and alter-centric perspective on brokerage in organizations and considering how brokerage processes can mediate and moderate others’ interactions and relationships. Overall, the current paper demonstrates how comparing social relations pre-brokerage versus post-brokerage reveals brokerage’s impact; broadens and builds scholarship on brokerage in organizations by conceptualizing brokerage as a multifaceted social influence process in organizations; and discusses opportunities for changing the questions we ask and the methods we use to study brokerage processes in organizations.