Chapter 4: Trust and Control in Strategic Alliances

It is only during the last two decades that the academic accounting and control discipline discovered strategic alliances as objects of study. In so doing, it became engaged in an endeavor that was already extensively undertaken by researchers in the field of management and organization. A reflection on extant research in the field of management and organization in the late 1980s led to an understanding of a “stampede” into various forms of interfirm co-operation (Powell, 1987). The 1990s showed accumulating research into organizational networks (also labeled as “hybrids” or “new organizational forms”) with particular emphasis on relational contracting, the role of co-ordination and control mechanisms, information practices, trust, the potentials for innovation, and the role of technological knowledge (see Miller, Kurunmäki, & O’Leary, 2008).