Franz Wohlgezogen

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.

Negotiating actor–environment relations: A framework for comparative research

When we try to explain the dynamic relationship between actors and their environment, “unidirectional” paradigms clustered at either end of an agency–determinism continuum, theoretical absolutes, and a focus on final outcomes are of limited value. Comparative research is uniquely positioned to move beyond such limitations and toward accounts of organizing that incorporate variation, interests, and interaction. To guide comparative research toward this more relational approach, we (1) highlight a move toward the middle ground of the agency–determinism continuum, that is, varieties of interaction and mutual influence between actors and their environments across levels of analysis; and (2) propose to conceptualize actor–environment relations as a “negotiation.” We use this metaphorical lens to stimulate a focus on the variety of different “negotiation spaces” and “negotiation moves,” which actors may utilize in an organizational field to affect stability or change. We provide an exemplary application of the framework and conclude with some observation on the implications for future research.