The Two Facets of Collaboration: Cooperation and Coordination in Strategic Alliances

This paper unpacks two underspecified facets of collaboration: cooperation and coordination. Prior research has emphasized cooperation, and specifically the partners' commitment and alignment of interests, as the key determinant of collaborative success. Scholars have paid less attention to the critical role of coordination—the effective alignment and adjustment of the partners' actions. To redress this imbalance, we conceptually disentangle cooperation and coordination in the context of inter-organizational collaboration, and examine how the two phenomena play out in the partner selection, design, and post-formation stages of an alliance's life cycle. As we demonstrate, a coordination perspective helps resolve some empirical puzzles, but it also represents a challenge to received wisdom grounded in the salience of cooperation. To stimulate future research, we discuss alternative conceptualizations of the relationship between cooperation and coordination, and elaborate on their normative implications

Attention and Control

we review the research on attention processes and on organizational control, and develop a framework that explains how different mechanisms of control affect attention allocation in an organization

Change comes at a cost: balancing alliance partners’ mission and efficiency goals in Chicago’s Back Office Cooperative

case study of the challenges encountered by a multilateral non-profit alliance and particular emphasis on the cultural barriers to realizing collaborative synergies

Strategic alliance structures: an organization design perspective

While strategic alliances have emerged in recent years as common and important structural vehicles for business development, surprisingly little is known about how collaborative activities are organized and administered within these governance structures. We see classic organizational scholarship as useful insofar as it both provides clear classifications that distinguish alternative intraorganizational designs and explicates how they affect the inner workings of organizations. Existing alliance classification schemes based on type of collaborative activity, partner characteristics, or legal structure, on the other hand, rarely delineate important differences of how collaborative work is organized among partners. We seek to redress this shortcoming by developing a framework of alliance structural parameters based on classic organizational design considerations. Specifically we identify and discuss five key design parameters for alliances: the structural interface between partners, the structural “intraface” within partners, and the specialization, formalization, and centralization of the alliance organization. We show how consideration of these five parameters provides a deeper understanding of alliance governance and suggest how partner organizations can achieve differential levels of connectivity and steering for their collaborative ventures

Strategic Alliance Structures: An Organization Design Perspective

While strategic alliances have emerged in recent years as common and important structural vehicles for business development, surprisingly little is known about how collaborative activities are organized and administered within these governance structures. We see classic organizational scholarship as useful insofar as it both provides clear classifications that distinguish alternative intraorganizational designs and explicates how they affect the inner workings of organizations. Existing alliance classification schemes based on type of collaborative activity, partner characteristics, or legal structure, on the other hand, rarely delineate important differences of how collaborative work is organized among partners. We seek to redress this shortcoming by developing a framework of alliance structural parameters based on classic organizational design considerations. Specifically we identify and discuss five key design parameters for alliances: the structural interface between partners, the structural intraface within partners, and the specialization, formalization, and centralization of the alliance organization. We show how consideration of these five parameters provides a deeper understanding of alliance governance and suggest how partner organizations can achieve differential levels of connectivity and steering for their collaborative ventures

The two facets of collaboration: cooperation and coordination in strategic alliances

This paper unpacks two underspecified facets of collaboration: cooperation and coordination. Prior research has emphasized cooperation, specifically partners’ commitment and alignment of interests, as the key determinant of collaborative success. Scholars have paid less attention to the critical role of coordination—the effective alignment and adjustment of partners’ actions. To redress this imbalance, we conceptually disentangle cooperation and coordination in the context of inter-organizational collaboration, and examine how the two phenomena play out in the partner selection, design, and post-formation stages of an alliance’s life cycle

Roaring out of a Recession

Research shows that 9% of companies come out of a recession stronger than ever. We explain their performance as a result of their ability to avoid false trade-offs during the downturn, and to integrate both cost-cutting and investment strategies

Rich language for poor firms: the symbolic management of bankruptcy

This study theorizes and tests the notion that firms that engage in symbolic can generate positive bankruptcy outcomes. We test our hypothesis with data on 250 bankruptcy cases spanning three years, employing a content analysis of these companies’ rich language surrounding the bankruptcy filing

Management Scholarships Contribution to Climate Change Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

As climate change pervades natural and social systems, the integration of social sciences in interdisciplinary climate change research is crucial but often lacking. In this study, we use bibliometric analyses of management research on climate change to understand how management scholars have navigated interdisciplinarity, and what impact their efforts had on top-tier climate change research. We find that management scholarship (1) features substantial engagement with an interdisciplinary knowledge base through backward references, and (2) fails to attract the attention of climate change research in top-tier interdisciplinary journals, as evidenced in very low and stagnant forward citations.