Toward a research agenda

With the launch of the Journal of Inter-Organizational Relationships comes the opportunity to assess the interorganizational research domain and provide some introductory thoughts to scholars in the field. My comments come after a strong consideration of the state of the domain and are offered as research questions that might be pursued. While all research questions must be balanced with the demands of data and methodological rigor, it helps to have targets to “solve” the questions in this exciting field raised by practitioners and researchers alike. A key element of any study of inter-organizational relationships is often governance, or the attempts to control dyadic and network partnerships. The study of governance has anchored our most robust (and most mature) theories, such as transaction cost analysis (Rindfleisch & Heide, 1997), agency theory (Eisenhardt, 1988), relational exchange (Macneil, 1980), trust and commitment theory (Morgan & Hunt, 1994), power dependence theory (Frazier et al., 1989), organizational control theory (Ouchi, 1979), and governance theory (Heide, 1994). The understanding and use of these governance theories and others has followed the familiar path of theoretical explication ! quantitative testing ! replication. The result of scholars’ efforts have been broad and substantive understanding of the various aspects of control. Thus, where, from here? In what way might we make significant contributions to the field? To begin to address this over-broad topic, I offer six research questions that may serve as an agenda for investigation.