Business Research Quarterly

Call for Papers for a Special Issue

Cooperative Interorganizational Relationships:

New Advances and Management Challenges

Submission Deadline: September 30^th, 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. 

Given these advances, this special issue aims to build on the advances made thus far and to call for new contributions that help to extend and update this stream of research.  We are particularly interested in papers that shed light on the increasing diversity and complexity that IR management involves. Some examples that merit further insight are:

• Intersections and comparisons

• Transferability of cooperative capabilities and governance structures among different types of IR.
• Cross- disciplinary research. The capacity of different theoretical traditions in contributing to the understanding of IR.

• Antecedents, evolution and drivers of performance

• Organizational, managerial, and cognitive drivers of performance at the firm, dyad, and alliance levels.
• The role of social structures, social ties and personality variables in the evolution and performance of IR.
• Knowledge and human resource management in IR
• How do ethics and social responsibility affect inter-firm cooperation and alliance performance?
• Partner selection and conflict management.

• Alliances in the public context

• How do alliances operate in a public context? Specificities of Public-Private-Partnerships (PPP), consortiums, grouping of municipalities, etc.
• Are alliance management criteria useful in the public context?
• Social franchising.

• Complexity

• Multilateral alliances and networks: Structure, dynamics and performance (especially in entrepreneurial settings).
• Coopetition. Analysis of the problematic interaction between cooperation and competition among rival partners.

These are but a few of the many research opportunities that the complexity and vast diversity of collaborative agreements offer to management and strategy studies. The thematic list reported above should not be considered exhaustive, and scholars may wish to complement the proposed list with other related topics. Submitted papers may also address these topics in different settings such as R&D alliances, franchising, or subcontracting.

The BRQ special issue welcomes both conceptual and empirical papers, utilizing a variety of theoretical perspectives and empirical research methods. The aim is to offer a well-balanced mix of papers that make a relevant contribution to the IR literature.

Submission process

Papers for the special issue should be prepared according to BRQ´s guidelines for authors. Publication of the special issue is planned for 2016. Original submissions are due by September 30^th, 2015, and must be sent online by accessing the Elsevier Editorial System at http://ees.elsevier.com/brq. Early submissions are encouraged. Authors should indicate that they would like their submission to be considered for the special issue "Cooperative Interorganizational Relationships: New Advances and Management Challenges".

Further information

Manuel González-Díaz: mgdiaz@uniovi.es

+34 985102807