Call for papers for a special issue—The research of inter-organizational relationships: Cross-border issues, settings, and insights

A long history exists of IOR scholarship in international settings. This impressive body of work was originally focused on market entry (Rosson & Ford, 1982), export relationships and performance (Madsen 1987; Munro & Beamish, 1987) and negotiations and disputes (Gulliver, 1979). It quickly blossomed into investigations of important IOR topics including strategy (Cavusgil & Shaoming, 1994), transaction costs and relationship structure (Klein et al., 1990), control (Gatignon & Anderson, 1988), governance (Bello & Gilliland, 1997), channel integration (Aulakh & Kotabe, 1997), and motivation (Katsikeas & Kaleka, 1999). More recently, scholars in this domain have made inter-organization trust a major theme (Couper et al., 2020; Katsikeas et al., 2009; Zaheer & Zaheer, 2006), as well as diversity and culture (Stahl et al., 2010), relational norms (Obadia et al., 2017), and relationship quality (Leonidou et al., 2014; Styles et al., 2008, Zhang et al., 2003). International IORs face significant and unique challenges including psychic, geographic, and cultural distances and disruptions (Evans, 2011; Obadia, 2013; Prime et al., 2009); financial constraints and regulations; political risk (Blumentritt & Nigh, 2002); communication difficulties (Griffith, 2002) and cultural differences (Gu et al., 2008; Stahl & Tung, 2015); governance, control, and motivation (Obadia et al., 2015); and feelings of foreignness (Samaha et al., 2014; Denk et al., 2012). These, and other important topics such as methodological concerns, continue to drive the international IOR literature. Aims and scope of this issue