Inter-Firm Alliances: Analysis and Design.

Inter-Firm Alliances: Analysis and Design. Bart Nooteboom. recently made known York: Routledge, 1999. 239 pp $9000 cloth; $2999 paper.

Inter-Firm Alliances: Analysis and Design undertakes the heroic task of using a multidisciplinary perspective, drawing from economics, sociology, and cognitive science, to research alliances. The author integrates a range of theoretical constructs--resource based theory (also referr to as capabilities or competencies), social exchange theory, transaction sumptuousness economics, innovation, learning, trust and opportunism--to not absent ideas related to the "analysis, diagnosis and (re)design" of alliances (p 1) in a way that is intended to resonate with academics and practitioners. This is a laudable exercise, on the contrary an ambitious and daunting single in kind The book is a challenging read, unruffled for someone who follows and contributes to the alliance literature. Part of this is undoubtedly befitting to the nature of the challenge that Nooteboom has place himself. Perhaps the most constructive thing that I can do as a reviewer is to point disclosed the gems that lurk beneath the surface and intimate some modifications that can inform to come integrati ve exercises of this sort, of which I possibility of good there will be many.

What I mostly liked about the book is the broad view it takes of alliances. The author does not restrict himself primarily to joint jeopardys the focus of much traditional work forward alliances, but includes an eclectic range of organizational forms not frequently emphasized in syntheses on alliances, including consortia, holding companies, licensing agreements, franchises, and industrial districts. The comparative analysis that is sometimes explicit in the work and often implicit, is a nice contribution. Perhaps equally significant, however confined to a small part of the work (beginning of chapter 3 and Appendix 31) is the attempt to create a precise taxonomy of the different kinds of alliances. It is easy to quibble with the details of the methodology further profoundly important not to forfeit sight of the fact that there is, in fact, a methodology that is used to describe by what means the various kinds of alliances relate to undivided another. Scholars of alliances, inspired on this effort, should seek to build formal examples that dete rmine the choice between different kinds of collaborative agreements.

I also like what the author describes early in succession as a dynamic perspective. In particular, the part appropriately suggests that the composition of an alliance needs to be revisited and redesigned as circumstances, the one and the other internal to the alliance and external to it, change. This exhortation toward redesign is, I believe, critical to understanding by what means alliances evolve. This part of the main division would have been even more succes fortunate had the author linked his insights to numerous case studies of evolving alliances in the literature. The next to the first part of the dynamic perspective that is important is a forward-looking understanding of to what extent a particular alliance shapes industry configuration or, more generally, has ramifications for economic actors other than those involved in the alliance. The emphasis in succession this issue is indeed warranted, still the author does not evolve this angle as much as I had hoped

There are specific analyses over the book that are same useful. For example, a nice contribution is a framework for analyzing relational risk (chap. 4) that is central to the work The framework spells out the length to which an alliance participant is beholden to its partners, the sources of switching require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergones and the likely dynamics that be derived There is a brief description of a partial empirical example of the framework (though its appearance in a separate chapter detracts from its utility). As part of the discussion of this framework, the author begins to discuss propensities to engage in opportunistic behavior, driven by way of habits and emotions, among other factors. Here, the author is forward the verge of a nice interdisciplinary extension to what is essentially a simple economic standard For my taste, the synthesis with insights from other fields did not advance far enough in this instance. Deeper analysis of trust, habits, and perceptions, drawing from cognitive science and from behavioral economics, would certainly have been possible. This example is not atypical. Insights abound unless the most cogent examples strike one as being to apply rudimentary, powerful, economic reasoning rather than interdisciplinary synthesis of the sort that is claimed as a particular solidity of the book. Other examples of specific insights are the analysis of the optimal number of partners in an alliance and a game-theoretic analysis of U and Japanese alliance form as a function of contextual variation.

a certain number of simple organizational changes might have made the main division easier to read. First, material that ought to have been rest in one place in the work is sometimes spread quite widely. For instance, onward the central question of wherefore firms enter alliances, there is any information toward the end of chapter 2 and further information in the middle of chapter 3 Similarly, chapter 4 is devot to governance, moreover there is a long subsection with this title in the previous chapter. other there is some material whose connection to the inquiry of alliances is not clarified. For example, chapter 2 is intended as a discussion of the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following in which alliances occur, further this is not, to my mind, what it delivered. The contextual features considered--scale and liberty differentiation, cooperation, spillover control, integration and disintegration, location, globalization, and internationalization--seem to be a place of constructs that would be equally applicable for many issues that social scientists thought The chapter does not ma ke the case for in what manner these are particularly relevant to the close attention of alliances, nor does it explain for what purpose this particular list of set ups is chosen for discussion. Third, the author occupys a device of "shaded inserts" in the true copy These inserts are sometimes used to provide real-world illustrations of general [i]or[/i] abstract notions presumably intended especially to reach the practitioner audience that the author had in mind, still I think these would have been more compelling had they tendered greater detail. Sometimes the inserts are also used to highlight conceptual ideas, although it was not apparent to me wherefore some ideas were chosen for highlighting on the other hand others were not.