Process issues in international alliance management: A debate on the evolution of collaboration

This is an unusual paper in that it consists of a series of contributions by a group of scholars with different perspectives on the critical processes of cross-border alliance collaboration and management. We focus on a single longitudinal analysis of a large, and ultimately unsuccessful, joint venture between two experienced global companies: Coca-Cola and Nestle. Starting from this common database, the authors offer diverse and often contradictory interpretations of the same events and of the responses undertaken by both partners. By confronting these various perspectives, we try to build a more robust set of theoretical constructs regarding the role of initial conditions, equity, and efficiency on the collaborative process. Furthermore, we develop the concept of relational quality as a proxy for inter-organizational trust and offer the proposition that it may have a non-linear relation to alliance success. Finally, we condense all the arguments into a set of propositions regarding process issues in alliance management and offer some guidelines for future research in this field.