The 2008 Dan and Mary Lou Schendel Best Paper Prize
The 2008 Winners are Peter Smith Ring and Andrew Van de Ven
Peter Smith Ring accepts award in Cologne
We are delighted to profile this year’s recipient of the Dan and Mary Lou Schendel Best Paper prize. This award recognizes a paper published at least five years ago that has made a lasting contribution to scholarship in strategic management. This year’s winner is Structuring Cooperative Relationships between Organizations, by Peter Smith Ring and Andrew Van de Ven, published in 1992. Structuring Cooperative Relationships examines governance structures and processes in cases of repeated cooperation among multiple organizations. The paper highlights relationships between risk and trust, contracts and contracting processes, and governance mechanisms. Peter and Andy’s work helped stimulate a rich and multi-faceted literature on these topics that continues to evolve in the academic and business literatures.
This year’s prize-winning article underscores an important feature of the Strategic Management Journal; namely, our willingness to help authors develop work that examines important empirical phenomena while framing the work in relevant conceptual perspectives. Structuring Cooperative Relationships could not have achieved its impact if it had nested itself within a single theory, seeking to fill in small gaps in existing frameworks. Instead, the paper used multiple complementary lenses to examine an issue that no single theory had been able to tackle successfully. As a result, the work opened important new arenas for subsequent research, rather than simply seeking to sweep the sand within an existing field of study.
We believe that SMJ’s willingness – indeed, its eagerness – to open new avenues of research, both by creating new concepts and thoughtfully combining existing points of view, has contributed to the ongoing vitality of strategic management research and the growth of the strategic management discipline. Of course, we welcome work that seeks to fill important gaps in existing theory. In addition, though, we encourage authors to draw on multiple lenses to create important insights about under-explored phenomena of strategy and organization. The strategic management challenges facing real-world organizations continues to evolve at a rapid pace, which necessitates an ongoing reframing of our understanding of strategic management. The Ring and Van de Ven research, by helping us understand the intricacies of cooperative relationships among competing firms, is exemplary in this regard.
Author: Ed Zajac
Click here to read more about The Dan and Mary Lou Schendel Best Paper Prize.
Click here to see the past winners of the award.