This research conceptualizes and operationalizes alliance management capability. The authors develop alliance management capability as a second-order construct to capture the degree to which organizations possess relevant management routines that enable them to effectively manage their portfolio of strategic alliances. In addition to identifying and measuring specific organizational routines as critical dimensions of alliance management capability, the authors advance knowledge on the performance effects of dedicated alliance structures and alliance experience based on survey data from 204 firms. Their primary contribution is a theoretically sound alliance management capability measure that is reflected by five underlying routines: interorganizational coordination, alliance portfolio coordination, interorganizational learning, alliance proactiveness, and alliance transformation. One of the key findings is that alliance management capability has a positive impact on alliance portfolio performance and mediates the performance effects of dedicated alliance structures and alliance experience.

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A phenomenon that has become the focus of recent research on interorganizational alliance network growth is that firms often enter into repeated relationships with prior partners. The implications of this tendency on corporate performance, however, are not well understood. From transaction cost and network perspectives, I test competing hypotheses on a large sample of multinational corporations. My results indicate clearly that firms not only often do enter into repeated equity‐based partnerships but also that those with a greater propensity to do so experience inferior economic performance. Further, statistical tests indicate that the negative effect of repeated partnerships on performance is particularly strong in environments of greater technological uncertainty. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Through an internalization theory lens, an argument is developed to suggest that the traditional concept of geographic scope should be split into two related, but more precise, elements of international asset dispersion and country environment diversity. Subsequently, these new concepts are tested using a structural equation modeling approach on a sample of 580 large multinational enterprises (MNEs). We find that the relationship between economic performance and international asset dispersion is positive, but that country environment diversity is negatively associated with performance, with a positive interaction between them. This study adds to our theoretical understanding of MNEs, and also provides a bridge between the mixed findings of prior research on multinationality by disentangling the unique effects of the latent subcomponents of geographic scope on firm performance. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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