Business Networks and Cooperation in International Business Relationships

The growing academic interest in cooperative strategies in international business has, during the last decades, focused mainly on formal cooperation as reflected in studies on international joint ventures, licensing, management contracts and strategic alliances [Contractor and Lorange 1988]. Parallel to this development, however, there has been a surge of interest in cooperative business relationships between supplier firms and customer firms in business markets. This interest has been manifested in studies in marketing [Anderson and Narus 1990; Dwyer, Schurr and Oh 1987], organization [Larson 1992; Powell 1990], accounting [Johnson 1992], and economics [Carlton 1986]. In all of these fields, the cooperative business relationships between suppliers and customers have been considered very important. It is surprising that, to our knowledge, no research on international business relationships has yet been presented in international business literature. This is even more surprising, when we consider that Toyne [1989] proposes international exchange as the foundation for theory building in international business. The relational exchange in business relationships is a very basic form of international exchange. Without questioning the relevance of received research on cooperative strategies in international business, we believe there is a need for studies on cooperation in relational exchange. This paper presents an empirical study of cooperation in international business relationships.