Cooperative Relationships between Organizations
I recently rediscovered an article by Ring and Van de Ven (1992), which was published in the Strategic Management Journal: Structuring cooperative relationships between organizations. Herein, the authors propose that “[v]arying levels of risk and reliance on trust will explain the governance structures of transactions”. They distinguish between low and high risk and between low and high reliance on trust. This leads to four cells: (1) markets (low risk, low reliance on trust transactions), (2) hierarchies (high, low), (3) recurrent contracts (low, high), and (4) relational contracts (high, high). Thus, the article provides “a conceptual framework for understanding a broader variety of governance mechanisms than those typically accompanying a focus on markets and hierarchies”. Ring and Van de Ven’s paper was the 2008 winner of The Dan and Mary Lou Schendel Best Paper Prize, which “recognizes a paper published at least five years ago that has made a lasting contribution to scholarship in strategic management”.
Ring, P.S., & Van de Ven, A.H. (1992). Structuring cooperative relationships between organizations. Strategic Management Journal, 13 (7), 483-498 DOI: 10.1002/smj.4250130702
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.
The Relational View in SCM Research
Published in 1998, The relational view: Cooperative strategy and sources of interorganizational competitive advantage by Dyer and Singh remains one of the most influential business papers. Ten years later, the authors discussed their paper in an interview with ScienceWatch.com. They argue that “the main contribution of the [paper] was that it outlined a theory for considering dyads and networks of firms as a key unit of analysis for explaining superior individual firm performance”. The relational view extends both the industry structure view (unit of analysis: industry) and the resource-based view (unit of analysis: firm), because from this view a critical resource can span firm boundaries. The four sources of interorganizational competitive advantage identified by the authors are: (1) relation-specific assets, (2) knowledge-sharing routines, (3) complementary resources/capabilities, and (4) effective governance. While researchers are still searching for the paradigm of SCM research, the relational view can be an important building block to explain the supply and demand network. The relational view has later been extended by Lavie (2006).
