A Longitudinal Study of the Management of Co-operative Strategies

One way of introducing our research project: ‘The Management of Cooperative Strategies: A Comparative and Longitudinal Study’ is to say that it attempts to confront hypotheses from economics with data derived from the investigative methods of social anthropology. This may have been the original intention, but the reality of the research in practice has transcended that rigid framework. The philosophies of the two subjects (economics and social anthropology) and their use of’empirical data’ are so different that a great deal of effort was necessary in attempting to reconcile what each regards as legitimate knowledge. Attempts to reconcile these subjects (the irreconcilable?) have been made (Buckley and Chapman 1996a, 1997, and Buckley and Casson 1993) and will not be reprised here. Rather, this paper examines the contribution to this project (and to management/economics studies generally) of three ‘big ideas’ imported and adapted from social anthropology. So, this article draws on a three-year longitudinal study of the management of co-operative strategies in a small sample of firms in pharmaceuticals and scientific instruments to examine the nature of the firm, managerial decisions on the boundaries of the firm, and co-operation across those boundaries. It begins with the classic Coasian construction of the firm and pursues the transaction cost economics agenda into the problems of calculation of transaction costs, relationships within and between firms, entrepreneurial behaviour, and managerial perceptions. The paper attempts to take a dynamic perspective.