An integrated perspective on alliance management

Alliance management has been on the agenda of management scholars and corporations for many years now. In spite of the growing attention that the academic and management literature has paid to many aspects of alliance management, track records of alliances are still poor. It can therefore be argued that the academic and management literature has been unable to unveil the secret ingredients of alliance success. In the past decades, academic research has identified three main levels of analysis in the field of alliances i.e. the dyadic perspective, the firm level and the network level. With a few exceptions the current body of literature discusses these three main levels of alliance management in isolation of each other. The combined effect of these different levels of alliance management has been largely neglected. In order to fill this void we argue that successful alliance management requires a profound understanding of all three levels of alliance management and their interaction. From this perspective, the contributions made by the different streams of alliance research are not autonomous, but are inherently interrelated.