Inter-organizational relationships. Towards a Dynamic Model for Understanding Business Network Performance

Organizations are strongly influenced by their inter-organizational relationships; moreover, these relationships may generate important externalities, both positive and negative, impacting the environment at several levels. The advent of the Internet era, on the other hand, is resulting in disruptive changes in traditional inter-organizational networks, and some completely new inter-organizational settings are rising. This book reviews all the most cited theories explaining inter-organizational phenomena: Transaction Costs Economics, Agency Theory, Resource Dependence Theory, Game Theories, Collaborative Networks theory, Institutional theories, Organizational Ecology, Resource Based – Relational Based View of the firm, Knowledge Networks – Social Networks theories. Moreover, it thoroughly reviews the literature on some key IT-enabled emerging inter-organizational systems, such as virtual organizations, e-intermediators and e-marketplaces. Then, the case of Yoox Group, a leading firm offering e-commerce services for fashion and design products, is presented. Finally, a framework is proposed to systematically link the different possible types of inter-organizational relationships to specific, suitable sets of theories. The range of possible inter-organizational relationships is described on the basis of three pairs of opposites: conformism-breach, exploitation-exploration, cooperation-competition. This results in a model allowing the integrated use of different theories and the study of the effects of inter-organizational ambidexterity and dynamism on performances.