Business Research Quarterly

Call for Papers for a Special Issue

Cooperative Interorganizational Relationships: New Advances and Management Challenges
 

Submission Deadline: September 30th, 2015

Guest Editors

Manuel González-Díaz, University of Oviedo (Spain)
Marko Grünhagen, Eastern Illinois University (US)

Aims and Scope

Cooperative interorganizational relationships (e.g., strategic alliances, franchising, or research consortia) have become pervasive in different industries that range from high-tech to services and retailing. Given its importance, academics have devoted considerable attention to this phenomenon during the last three decades, resulting in a great deal of theoretical and empirical work on interorganizational relationships (IRs). This phenomenon has thus become a classic theme in strategic and management research, with studies examining issues as diverse as the antecedents and motivation for establishing collaborative relationships, partner selection issues, governance structure, performance implications, or alliance survival. Additionally, all this work is grounded in very different disciplinary traditions that range from economics (e.g. transaction cost and agency theories) to strategy and organizational disciplines. This eclectic methodology captures the richness in IRs studies and also helps to explain the impressive rise in this area of research.

This progress in academic research is based on an evolution of IRs in practice. IRs are now characterized by their extension, diversity and complexity. Thus, we observe that (1) some IRs have become leading organizational forms, such as franchising in US retailing for instance, (2) several variations of IRs modes are used in different institutional settings and serve many different purposes (such as obtaining financial resources, managing technology challenges, expanding into international markets or developing public-private partnerships), and (3) IRs contracts involve multilateral and multilevel alliances (e.g. master-franchising, multi-unit franchising, alliance constellations or R&D networks) and manage many-faceted knowledge flows, elaborate governance structures, and even coopetition among rival partners.

Full information is available at

http://www.unioviedo.es/ISOF2015/BRQ_Call_for_papers.pdf

 

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