Transitioning to the Journal of Inter-Organizational Relationships

Welcome to the transitional issue of the Journal of InterOrganizational Relationships. JIOR has emerged from the Journal of Marketing Channels with a new focus, while not forgetting JMC’s legacy of serving the channels field. This issue represents the first published under the new journal’s banner but is in effect a transition from its previous work as JMC. Why the transition in the first place? A marketing channel relationship is inherently an inter-organizational relationship: two or more organizations working with one another to move products or services down one or more marketing channels toward end-use customers. Inherent in “working with one another” comes all the benefits of relationships, like trust, commitment, and enhanced performance, along with all the negative aspects of relationships, such as opportunism, conflict, and power imbalances. But aren’t there other, similar relationships in business, such as buyer–seller partnerships, networked relationships, strategic partnerships, joint ventures, supply chain relationships, and more? Further, all these other types of relationships share the same theoretic domains such as power-dependence theory (Frazier et al., 1989), transaction cost economics (Rindfleisch & Heide, 1997), organizational control theory (Ouchi, 1979), agency theory (Bergen et al., 1992), governance theory (Heide, 1994), contract law (Mooi & Ghosh, 2010), and relational exchange theory (Kaufmann & Stern, 1988). Further, the more we read outside of marketing, into fields such as management, accounting, sociology, and law, the more we find similar concepts, but written from a different base of perspective, often using the same theoretic background (Rubin, 1990; Vosselman & van der Meer-Kooistra, 2009), and often other backgrounds (Black, 1998; Ellickson, 1987). The idea of parallel literature streams developing with inadequate cross-pollination seemed unfortunate. Why not encompass all the previous work, across disciplines, in one academic source? Thus, the idea for JIOR began. Now, after doing some secondary and primary research, reaching across academic divides into other fields to expand the editorial review board, and repositioning the brand, the first issue is ready to go. This issue, however, will transition us from JMC to JIOR by including an invited manuscript examining JMC’s enormous contribution to the IOR field, the first article of the new regime, and two manuscripts accepted under the JMC banner. First, Zemanek and Tran, in an invited piece, look back at over 25 years of JMC contributions to the field with an eye on future research ideas for JIOR. Second, Gr€ unhagen and Sadeh investigate a topic in a context near and dear to interorganizational relationships, franchising. They explain the effects of information asymmetry—in terms of geographic distance, the regulatory environment, and business sector differences—on the relationship between M&A targets and performance. Next, Gao, Wang, and Qian provide interesting findings in their examination of how social interactions affect the familiar relationship between process and output controls and performance. Finally, Wu and Cui take a recent historical perspective on Chinese retail channels. We hope you’ll enjoy the transition issue of JIOR!