Interorganizational Relationships

I wish to call attention to an article by Parmigiani and Rivera-Santos, which was recently published in the Journal of Management: Clearing a path through the forest: A meta-review of interorganizational relationships. The authors conduct a review of reviews (meta-review) that were concerned with forms (i.e., alliances, joint ventures, buyer–supplier agreements, licensing, co-branding, franchising, cross-sector partnerships, and networks) and theories (i.e., organizational economics and organization theory) of interorganizational relationships. The authors also propose that any interorganizational relationship combines “traits from two hypothetical, pure relationship forms”: co-exploration and co-exploitation. The former aims to “create new knowledge, tasks, functions, or activities”, whereas the latter aims to “execute existing knowledge, tasks, functions, or activities”. This framework really clears a path through the forest, in which specific theories or forms are the “trees” and the overall nature of these relationships is the “forest”. I believe that this path is interesting for many researchers in our field.