Problematizing Strategic Alliance Research: Challenges, Issues and Paradoxes in the New Era

Abstract

Strategic alliances have attracted substantial attention from industry and academia over the past three decades. However, due to rapid technological evolution, saturated marketplaces, globalisation of businesses on the one hand and de‐globalisation of the market on the other (as marked by Brexit and the trade war between US and China, COVID‐19 pandemic and the Ukraine war), the strategic environment of businesses is changing quickly. Fundamental and rapid changes in the wider environment necessitate the review of theoretical and practical insights of earlier and emerging studies ‐ to examine the new challenges, issues and paradoxes of strategic alliances. This special issue attempts to provide a forum to allow researchers to question the assumptions underlying existing theory a little further beyond just “gap‐spotting” or “gap‐filling”. This special issue includes four very interesting literature review pieces, which venture deeper into the phenomenon, and explore the opportunities, issues and paradoxes of strategic alliances while adopting alternative theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches and interpretations to address issues of managing strategic alliances and maximising returns from them in the new strategic context.

Examining the impact of resilience strategies in mitigating medicine shortages in the United Kingdom's (UK) pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC)

“…The complexity of the product design and the number of suppliers in the PSC was attributed to the increased monopolistic behaviours when strategic alliances were formed. It is supported by extant literature which suggests possible adverse behaviours in complex strategic partnerships (He et al ., 2020, 2021). Also, smaller individual firms suffered, thus leading to partner dissatisfaction.…”

What Changes and Opportunities Does Big Data Analytics Capability Bring to Strategic Alliance Research? A Systematic Literature Review

“…On the one hand, BDAC is able to change the pathway of achieving alliance performance to some extent (Mikalef et al., 2018). Enterprises are for instance more likely to realize performance through ecological advantage, cross‐border growth, value co‐creation and dynamic alliance (He et al., 2021; Porter & Heppelmann, 2014), as achieved by Tencent . On the other hand, BDAC effectively reduces the reliance on the scale effects of resources to achieve performance.…”

“…However, despite the growing research in the last few decades, there are still two main types of research limitations among previous studies. First, the majority of scholars in SA research rarely adopt a problematization perspective to conduct theoretical discussion and reflection on the phenomenon of SAs (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011), which hinders them from offering more interesting and influential insights for SA research (He et al., 2021). Specifically, many researchers adopt a gap‐filling (or a gap‐spotting) approach based on the traditional arguments of existing SA theories to conduct SA research, rather than questioning and criticizing those arguments underlying existing SA theories (He et al., 2020).…”

“…Therefore, this methodology is not a suitable tool to generate interesting and influential research questions that drive the development of existing theories in SA research. Actually, it is more helpful to promote the development of SA theories by criticizing existing literature through problematization (He et al., 2021; Jones & Gatrell, 2014).…”

“…As a matter of fact, as the current business environment is increasingly characterized by the twofold techniques of digitalization and transformation (He et al., 2016, 2021), some key arguments of traditional SA theories seem to be less powerful to explain the new phenomenon of SAs in the digitalization context. For example, the resource‐based view (RBV) was first introduced by Wernerfelt (1984) and one of its key arguments is the relative immobility of resources across organizations, which leads to the formation of SAs, to some extent (Barney, 1991; Peteraf, 1993).…”