A Comparison Between US and Japanese Automakers.pdf

Configurations of Inter-Organizational Relationships: A Comparison Between US and Japanese Automakers M. Bensaou INSEAD Boulevard de Constance 77309 Fontainebleau Cedex, France (33-1) 6072-4021 and N. Venkatraman Boston University School of Management 704 Commonwealth Avenue Boston MA 02215 Forthcoming in Management Science The manuscript is based on the doctoral research by the first author at MIT Sloan School of Management, which was awarded the first prize at the 1992 ICIS doctoral dissertation competition, and was a finalist in the Business Policy and Strategy Divisions 1993 Dissertation competition for the Academy of Management. Both authors acknowledge the financial support for this research made available by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation under the MIT International Motor Vehicle Program, the Management in the 1990s Research Program, and by the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR). We also thank the managers in the leading firms in the auto industry both in the USA and Japan for spending time with us and providing the required data and interpretations. 2Configurations of Inter-Organizational Relationships: A Comparison Between US and Japanese Automakers Abstract This paper seeks to uncover dominant configurations of inter-organizational relationships across the USA and Japan in the automotive industry. We integrate relevant theoretical concepts from transaction cost economics, organization theory and political economy to develop a conceptual model of inter-organizational relationships based on the fit between information processing needs and information processing capabilities. This model is employed to collect data on 447 buyer-supplier relationships in these two countries. We empirically uncover a set of five naturally occurring patterns of inter-organizational relationships. These configurations provide rich explanations of the complexity of inter- organizational relationships as well as offer differential insights across US and Japan. We discus