Interorganizational Governance in Marketing Channels

Relationship management rapidly is becoming a central research paradigm in the marketing channels literature. A growing body of conceptual and empirical literature addresses different aspects of interfirm relationships, building in part on recent theoretical developments in organization theory, law, and economics. Interestingly, however, some of these theoretical frameworks make radically different assumptions about the nature of interfirm relationships, though these differences to date have not been examined systematically in the marketing literature. The author reviews these theoretical perspectives and develops a formal typology of approaches to relationship management. Specifically, he develops a typology of three different forms of governance, which vary systematically in terms of how specific interfirm processes are carried out. He also discusses the antecendents of different relationship forms and shows the results of a preliminary empirical test.