Culture in alliance research

Abstract

In the literature on interorganizational collaboration, cultural issues remain underdeveloped relative to other theoretical concerns. The cultural turn in organizational analysis – with its focus on shared artifacts, values, norms, and assumptions as elements of organizational culture and organizations’ cultural context, and the importance of these elements for organizational cognition and collective strategies of action – has had a profound impact on research on firms, professions, and industries, but is felt much less in interorganizational scholarship. However, over the last three decades, a variety of alliance studies have shed some light on the symbolic, non-rational, and non-structura..