Corporate Strategic Alliances: Motivation, Governance And Performance

A strategic alliance is a special economic relationship established by firms to achieve their certain strategic goals. In this relationship competition and cooperation coexist. With the development of economy and the accelerated pace of globalization, strategic alliances increase sharply and are becoming a new pattern of industrial organization. Some scholars predict that in 21st century competitions between strategic alliances will prevail and the "Alliance Capitalism" is coming.In China, the market economy is going to maturity, the level of social labor division and specialization is getting higher, and the embed ness of firms has been gradually enhanced. Then firms' competitive advantages are not only those that related to its interior management, but the system ones that across organizational boundaries based on value chain or value network. It is obviously of great significance to do researches on strategic alliances and abstract principles of cooperation, alliance and competition across organizations, which can guide domestic firms in operation and management.Nowadays foreign researches on strategic alliances have been very mature, including theory foundation, empirical data verification and applied analysis. There have been several theory schools, each of which has rich empirical material supported. But domestic researches are comparatively weak, basically still in the period of introducing foreign theories. We are in short of analysis based on local context using local data with scientific method. In fact, the characteristics of management require its studies must emphasize on grounded localization instead of directly copying others. From this point of view, this paper focuses on three main aspects about strategic alliances: motivation—the reasons why firms are allied;governance-----the formation of alliance and determints of its governance;performance—the factors that affect an alliance's performances. This paper based on local context and empirical data of local firms, compares and verifies applicability and feasibility of present strategic alliance theories in China by using scientific methods such as case study and questionnaires on a large sampleThrough the study we find that: firstly, instead of improving its knowledge and...