Strategic Alliances for Environmental Protection

Abstract:     
Existing scholarship regarding strategic alliances has been limited by the tendency to view alliance formation through a single theoretical lens and to focus solely on the economic aspects (e.g. acquisition of capabilities) of narrowly defined relationships. As yet, there has been little attention towards examining how strategic alliances - of all sorts - can address social, economic and environmental issues. This chapter addresses these concerns by integrating the resource-based view of the firm with institutional theory to assess firms’ decisions to participate in a strategic alliance. Drawing on these motivations, this chapter articulates a framework to characterize strategic alliances based on their focus on competency- and legitimacy-orientation. A conceptual model is then constructed to examine the extent to which these strategic alliances are likely to encourage firms to adopt more (or less) proactive environmental strategies.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 26

Keywords: Strategic Alliances, Alliance Formation, Environmental Performance, Resource-Based View, Institutional Theory

JEL Classification: M11, M14

Accepted Paper Series