Interorganizational Governance Trajectories: Toward a Better Understanding of the Connections between Partner Selection, Negotiation and Contracting

Introduction. Interorganizational relationships consist of several stages, such as a search and selection stage, a negotiation stage, and a contracting stage (e.g. Jap and Ganesan, 2000; Reuer, 1999, 2000). Each of these stages corresponds with distinct governance decisions, which collectively enable partners to achieve coordination and control during the life-cycle of their relationships. Hitherto, however, little research has examined the use of multiple mechanisms to structure exchange relationships (Jap and Ganesan, 2000), and studies on sequences of successive governance decisions are still rare in the literature (Long etal., 2002; Narayandas and Rangan, 2004). This has led to a significant gap in our understanding of interorganizational governance. This chapter therefore focuses on the following research question: How are interorganizational relationships governed during different stages of cooperation, and how are the governance decisions In these stages related

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