A new direction for strategic alliance research in marketing: organizational cognition

For marketers and other strategists, the importance of strategic alliances is increasing in both research and practice. Despite frequent considerations of the potential benefits of these interorganizational relationships in both domestic and international markets, alliances have often failed to live up to expectations in practice. Traditional research paradigms have provided few meaningful insights into the causes of success and failure. In this paper, we propose that research using an organizational cognition perspective can provide valuable insights into alliance development and management. We derive important alliance research questions and draw from a wide range of cognitive methodologies to suggest specific directions for future research.