Governance of Inter-organizational System based Collaboration: supply chain cases

Disagreements and power struggles induce failure in many collaborations based on an inter-organizational system (IOS). The stakeholders’ emergence and involvement fluctuate across a collaboration’s timeline. Inter-organizational governance is needed to achieve sustainable cooperation. However, most researchers and practitioners jump on the trend of “governance” as a buzzword.
This thesis utilizes the stakeholder theory – the network model perspective – to complement the state of the art conceptualization. Building blocks of IOS-based inter-organizational collaboration governance are applied as a framework in longitudinal studies of supply chain cases. The building blocks are stakeholders, governance mechanisms, governance aspects, governance modes, and governance lifecycles.
The building blocks help to analyze the governance evolutions from the first pre-partnership collaboration phase to the partnership termination phase or the collaborations’ succession to the next cycle. The governance modes classify collaborations to simplify our descriptions of governance. The roles of stakeholders – members, IOS providers, orchestrators, supply chain partners, and other partners - define the collaborations’ context. These stakeholders exercise formalized and informal mechanisms in all governance aspects. The cases also provide insights into the collaborations’ success and missteps in executing inter-organizational governance.