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Firms rely on productive relationships with other firms to organise their economic activities and joint projects, but interorganisational networks of this nature may exhibit a ‘dark side’. Despite their reputation as flexible, these network structures can exert restrictive forces with negative conse-quences for firms’ strategic flexibility, performance, and survival. To explain why and how such situations arise, this study develops an explanatory framework that integrates the network approach from organisation and management studies, path dependence theory, and social capital. The framework conceptualises a development dynamic from initial, non-deterministic relationships to increasingly stable, cohesive, and densely connected groups of organisations (alliances). These may lock-in through the interacting cognitive, relational, and structural dimensions of the social capital process – the mechanism driving such path dependence in interorganisational networks which reduces members’ options in these dimensions. Empirical evidence from a case study in the smartphone industry substantiates and illustrates the framework. Firms in this industry created two competing alliances around hub firms and respective software platforms. The case data revealed cohesive network dynamics and considerable lock-in potential with related difficulties. To study the specific conditions of the final, lock-in stage of the process, an agent-based social simulation model was used to experiment with contrasting network scenarios. The experiments revealed that the behavioural assumptions for conceptualising agents exert a strong influence on lock-in conditions regarding …