Negotiating Interorganizational Orders

Strauss' (1978) negotiation paradigm is used to analyze interorganizational relations leading to development of a complex of eleven rehabilitation agencies. Analysis is based on records over a twenty-five year period and four years of participant observation and interviewing. The structural context for the negotiations is described in terms of over-lapping societal, communal, interorganizational, organizational, and interpersonal levels. The analysis points out the importance of covert, informal negotiations to interorganizational relations. The negotiators who initiated the process employed a strategy of multiple-linked negotiations in which they attempted to select negotiators from the other organizations and the issues to be negotiated. Stakes were manipulated according to a cost-reward-involvement formula. Problematic issues were dealt with in informal covert negotiations which preceded overt negotiations in a peer type council. Consideration of the negotiation process aids in understanding several problems in interorganizational relations: power and autonomy and the consequences of interlocking directorates. The negotiated order approach suggests several lines of additional research.