JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Academy of Management is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Academy of Management Review.Strategic alliances have been recognized as arenas with potential for opportunistic behavior by partners. Hence, a firm needs to have an adequate level of confidence in its partner's cooperative behavior. In this article we examine the notion of confidence in partner cooperation in alliances and suggest that it comes from two distinct sources: trust and control. We make the argument that trust and control are parallel concepts and that their relationship is of a supplementary character in generating confidence. In addition, we suggest that control mechanisms have an impact on trust level and that the trust level moderates the effect of control mechanisms in determining the control level. Finally, we discuss various ways to build trust within strategic alliances and important alliance control mechanisms.We thank Special Issue Editor Sim Sitkin and three anonymous AMR reviewers for their helpful comments.

The resource-based view of the firm has not been systematically applied to strategic alliances. By examining the role of firm resources in strategic alliances, we attempt, in this paper, to put forward a general resource-based theory of strategic alliances, synthesizing the various findings in the literature on alliances from a resource-based view. The proposed theory covers four major aspects of strategic alliances: rationale, formation, structural preferences, and performance. The resource-based view suggests that the rationale for alliances is the value-creation potential of firm resources that are pooled together. We note that certain resource characteristics, such as imperfect mobility, imitability, and substitutability, promise accentuated value-creation, and thus facilitate alliance formation. We discuss how the resource profiles of partner firms would determine their structural preferences in terms of four major categories of alliances: equity joint ventures, minority equity alliances, bilateral contract-based alliances, and unilateral contract-based alliances. As part of the theory, we propose a typology of inter-partner resource alignment based on the two dimensions of resource similarity and resource utilization, yielding four types of alignment: supplementary, surplus, complementary, and wasteful. We also discuss how partner resource alignment directly affects collective strengths and inter-firm conflicts in alliances, which in turn contribute to alliance performance. Finally, we develop a number of propositions to facilitate empirical testing of the theoretical framework, suggest ways to carry out this testing, indicate future research directions, and list some of the more significant managerial implications of the framework.

Trust and control are inextricably interlinked with risk in strategic alliances. Hence, to understand how partner firms can effectively reduce and manage this risk, we need to examine the inter-relationships between trust, control, and risk. In this article, we propose a comprehensive and integrated framework of the three constructs in the context of strategic alliances, contending that trust and control are the two principal antecedents of risk. First, we suggest that the three constructs are each comprised of certain key dimensions. Risk can be considered separately as relational risk and performance risk. The two dimensions of trust are identified as goodwill trust and competence trust, and control is differentiated in terms of the three modes of behaviour control, output control, and social control. Second, we discuss systematically the various linkages between the different types of trust, control, and risk in alliances. Third, we suggest several risk reduction approaches — minimizing relational risk through goodwill trust, behaviour control, and social control, while minimizing performance risk through competence trust, output control, and social control. Fourth, we discuss a number of trust-building techniques and control mechanisms to reduce risk in different types of strategic alliances. Finally, we develop propositions for empirical testing of the integrated framework and offer brief comments on future research directions and managerial implications

California's highly variable climate and growing water demands combine to pose both water-supply and flood-hazard challenges to resource managers. Recently important efforts to more fully integrate the management of floods and water resources have begun, with the aim of benefitting both sectors. California is shown here to experience unusually large variations in annual precipitation and streamflow totals relative to the rest of the US, variations which mostly reflect the unusually small average number of wet days per year needed to accumulate most of its annual precipitation totals (ranging from 5 to 15 days in California). Thus whether just a few large storms arrive or fail to arrive in California can be the difference between a banner year and a drought. Furthermore California receives some of the largest 3-day storm totals in the country, rivaling in this regard the hurricane belt of the southeastern US. California's largest storms are generally fueled by landfalling atmospheric rivers (ARs). The fractions of precipitation and streamflow totals at stations across the US that are associated with ARs are documented here and, in California, contribute 20-50% of the state's precipitation and streamflow. Prospects for long-lead forecasts of these fractions are presented. From a meteorological perspective, California's water resources and floods are shown to derive from the same storms to an extent that makes integrated flood and water resources management all the more important. OPEN ACCESSWater 2011, 3 446

The instabilities of strategic alliances have been examined in the literature through a number of theoretical approaches. Alliance instabilities refer to major changes or dissolutions of alliances that are unplanned from the perspective of one or more partners. Although the literature identifies certain characteristics of strategic alliances that may lead to their unplanned dissolution, the extent of our understanding of this subject appears to be fragmented and incomplete. In this article we propose a comprehensive framework for adequately understanding alliance instabilities based on the notion of internal tensions. We suggest that strategic alliances are sites in which conflicting forces develop and which can be viewed as being constituted by three key pairs of competing forces-namely, cooperation versus competition, rigidity versus flexibility, and short-term versus long-term orientation. This tensions framework helps us in explaining the intrinsic vulnerability of alliances in terms of a wide range of internal contradictions and enables us to examine, in an integrated manner, the incidence, dynamics, and eventual dissipation of the inherent instabilities. We discuss the interrelationships among the different internal tensions and their impacts on different types of strategic alliances. We also examine the termination of alliances through mergers/acquisitions and dissolution. Finally, we suggest ways to empirically test the various ideas and propositions developed here and indicate directions for further research.

Observations have shown that the hydrological cycle of the western United States changed significantly over the last half of the 20th century. We present a regional, multivariable climate change detection and attribution study, using a high-resolution hydrologic model forced by global climate models, focusing on the changes that have already affected this primarily arid region with a large and growing population. The results show that up to 60% of the climate-related trends of river flow, winter air temperature, and snow pack between 1950 and 1999 are human-induced. These results are robust to perturbation of study variates and methods. They portend, in conjunction with previous work, a coming crisis in water supply for the western United States.

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Recently the Southwest has experienced a spate of dryness, which presents a challenge to the sustainability of current water use by human and natural systems in the region. In the Colorado River Basin, the early 21st century drought has been the most extreme in over a century of Colorado River flows, and might occur in any given century with probability of only 60%. However, hydrological model runs from downscaled Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment climate change simulations suggest that the region is likely to become drier and experience more severe droughts than this. In the latter half of the 21st century the models produced considerably greater drought activity, particularly in the Colorado River Basin, as judged from soil moisture anomalies and other hydrological measures. As in the historical record, most of the simulated extreme droughts build up and persist over many years. Durations of depleted soil moisture over the historical record ranged from 4 to 10 years, but in the 21st century simulations, some of the dry events persisted for 12 years or more. Summers during the observed early 21st century drought were remarkably warm, a feature also evident in many simulated droughts of the 21st century. These severe future droughts are aggravated by enhanced, globally warmed temperatures that reduce spring snowpack and late spring and summer soil moisture. As the climate continues to warm and soil moisture deficits accumulate beyond historical levels, the model simulations suggest that sustaining water supplies in parts of the Southwest will be a challenge.climate change | regional modeling | sustainability | water resources P ersistent dry conditions have generally prevailed in the Southwest during the early years of the 21st century (1), after wetter than normal conditions in the preceding years. Such droughts have substantial impacts on the humans, animals, and plants inhabiting the Southwest, and call into question whether we can sustain the water resources that we have come to depend upon in the 20th century. This study uses high resolution (1∕8°× 1∕8°) hydrological model simulations, driven by observed and downscaled global climate model meteorological fields, to investigate the region's droughts. Our goals are to place the 21st century drought into the context of the 20th century, and determine how Southwest drought is likely to change from its 20th century patterns in the future.The Southwest's hydrology is marked by strong variability on seasonal to multiannual time scales, reflecting its sensitivity to fluctuations in large scale atmospheric circulation patterns. Preinstrumental paleoclimate records indicate that periods of extreme dryness have occurred sporadically during the last millennium (2, 3), so the 21st century drought is far from unprecedented. Some of the most prominent of these prehistoric droughts occurred in the midst of anomalously warm conditions, perhaps in similar fashion to the recent early 21st century drought. A protracted period of such dry conditions is...