Anne Parmigiani

Clearing a Path Through the Forest: A Meta-Review of Interorganizational Relationships

Interorganizational relationships (IORs) encompass a broad array of collaborative exchanges, including strategic alliances, joint ventures, buyer—supplier agreements, licensing, co-branding, franchising, cross-sector partnerships, networks, trade associations, and consortia. Scholarly work in this area typically focuses on particular forms, which has made it difficult to build a holistic understanding of why organizations engage in these relationships. This article summarizes the IOR literature by conducting a meta-review, a review of the reviews that have covered various IOR forms and theories. Through this approach, the authors highlight similarities and differences among forms and acknowledge perspectives grounded in organizational economics and organization theory. In line with March’s seminal framework, the authors identify two pure forms of IORs: co-exploration and co-exploitation. Explicating these pure forms enables the integration of different theories and the reconciliation of the empirical reality that IORs, like firms, combine exploration and exploitation. The authors conclude by suggesting directions for future work, highlighting areas rich in potential.

Routines Revisited: Exploring the Capabilities and Practice Perspectives

Organizational routines, repetitive patterns of interdependent organizational actions, have been investigated through the lens of capabilities, rooted in organizational economics, and the lens of practice, grounded in organization theory. The former approach emphasizes the “what” or “why,” while the latter emphasizes the “how.” In this review, we summarize both of these literatures and explore recent empirical studies in each stream, identifying common themes. In particular, we compare and contrast how each perspective incorporates the effects of individual actors, tacit knowledge, ambidexterity, and context specificity. We find that the two streams of work have distinct trajectories and strengths, but elements of each can be complementary to developing a more holistic understanding of organizational routines.

C. K. Prahalad's passions reflections on his scholarly journey as a researcher, teacher, and management guru

Recently we had the opportunity to spend 2 engaging hours interviewing Professor “CK” Prahalad. This was a privilege for us given CK’s busy schedule of teaching MBAstudents, consulting to CEOs, working on his research, and serving on a special United Nations Commission on Private Sector and Poverty Alleviation. Although we have known CK for some time, listening to him share his extraordinary career journey was fascinating.

WHEN COLLABORATION TRUMPS RIVALRY: EXAMINING ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS IN THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY

Vertical groups are inter-firm structures that populate industries such as film production, architecture, and construction. Vertical groups consist of stable sets of suppliers and buyers that interact regularly in a persistent pattern of exchange relations. Such collaborations shift boundary decisions from a rivalrous choice by a single firm acting alone to a collaborative decision by the entire group. This raises the level of analysis to the group level, and questions the validity of prior, rivalrous theories of the firm. To examine this, we applied traditional theories of the firm to a collaborative setting. Using archival data on bridge construction project networks, we examine how project characteristics affect vertical group structure. Specifically, we predict and find that more diverse projects led to less embedded vertical groups, with a greater number of partners and few prior relationships, whereas more uncertain projects led to highly embedded vertical groups with fewer, better known partners.

HOW INTRA-FIRM AND INTER-FIRM EXPERTISE AFFECT THE SOURCING DECISIONS OF TECHNOLOGICALLY INTERDEPENDENT COMPONENTS.

This research article examines how intra-organizational and inter-organizational expertise impacts the sourcing decisions of technologically interdependent components. The authors argue that organization and supplier expertise affect the incentives to undertake concurrent sourcing of interdependent and complementary components. The research is conducted using North American powder metal and metal stamping companies. An overview of the methods of the study is presented. Results include the finding that an organization with a degree of expertise that spans compenents will most likely concurrently source as opposed to vertically integrate.