Travel Reference
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have, their own agendas to follow in formulating and implementing policy and as such collabo-
ration strategies need to be adopted with caution (Hollinshead 1990). There is also the issue in
the context of international airline alliances that member size, reach and impact on decision
making varies with power not always equally shared.
Other politics-based theoretical explanations of collaboration include theories of corporate
social performance and institutional theory. While Wood (1991) highlights the former as being
of benefi t in assessing the extent to which principles of social responsibility motivate collabora-
tive behaviour, Clarkson (1995) suggests that collaborating stakeholders need to perceive fairness
and equity in the distribution of the wealth and value created through collaboration. With an
increasing need for organizations to be accountable for their actions, closer scrutiny of collaborat-
ing partners is a natural reaction with scrutiny now going well beyond traditional market and
fi nancial performance (Boesso and Kumar 2007) with social contracts not now uncommon
between organizations and society (Lieberman and Nissen 2008). Although true for interna-
tional airline alliances, and possibly a feature of longer-term maturity of the key alliances, such
ambitions were not integral to the early stages of development. Along similar lines, institutional
theory and negotiated order theory both seek to explain processes of change as well as the
symbolic and perceptual aspects of collaboration and collaborative relationships (Strauss 1978;
Modell 2006). Although maybe less signifi cant in the past, such approaches are gaining traction
as the need to adhere to regulation and the need to demonstrate a sense of duty or 'moral
obligation' to stakeholders becomes more apparent (Vargas-Sanchez and Riquel-Ligero 2010).
The need to reduce carbon emissions is perhaps the most obvious issue facing airlines with
collaborative efforts integral to a more effective and effi cient international airline industry.
Process-based theories
While process-based theories are dominated by the need to understand how collaborative
arrangements emerge, evolve, decline and disappear over time, they also focus on the need to
determine common features in their dynamics and evolution (Ring and van de Ven 1994; Jap
and Anderson 2007). Although there is an emerging corpus of research in this fi eld, there is a
surprising paucity of consensus as to the exact number of phases, their duration and what
constitutes collaborative success (Wang and Fesenmaier 2007). One of the impediments to
consensus is the number of macro and micro environmental factors at play that can impact, both
positively and negatively, the collaboration process and in turn impact the performance and
effectiveness of the collaboration. Despite the complexity of the issues at hand, the models
advocated by Gray (1985, 1989), Selin and Chavez (1995) and Caffyn (2000) are widely referred
to in the literature with a synthesis provided in Fyall and Garrod (2005). Although each vary, they
all seek: identifi cation of the problem domain and key stakeholders; agreement as to the common
sense of purpose and how and when it is to be achieved; the effective management of the
collaborative process in a systematic manner and one in which evolutionary behaviour is
encouraged which, ultimately, may lead to termination, dissolution or reformulation of the
collaborative arrangement. This latter point is a particular feature of the study by Caffyn (2000)
in that it includes an 'after-life' component where the actual purpose of the collaboration is
implicitly or explicitly re-evaluated. Interestingly, this is not an option that has surfaced to date
with the three major international airline alliances. That said, the time will surface when for
reasons of cost, changing ownership or changing strategic direction individual airlines will begin
to question their member benefi ts and begin to confront the need to either remain collaborative
or seek a more individual competitive route.
