Collaboration of Firms With New Forms of Organizing: Extending the Relational View

Abstract

New forms of organizing (NFOs) such as crowds and communities are increasingly relevant as novel collaboration partners for organizations. Although the motivations and goals that prompt organizations to collaborate (the why) have not changed over time, the way they collaborate (the how) seems to have changed significantly. Surprisingly, research to theorize these new forms of collaboration is still sparse. This conceptual paper investigates the extent to which a widely established theoretical framework—the relational view—can capture this new and mostly undertheorized setting of firm–NFO collaborations. More precisely, we ask whether and how the relational view also applies to this new context of interaction between firms and NFOs. Adopting the relational view’s four determinants as a framework, we systematically analyse and disentangle firms’ collaborations with NFOs. We ground this investigation in two analytical dimensions, the degree of NFO self-organizing and the degree of firm-relatedness. They enable us to exemplify the variety of new forms of collaboration and, most important, to delineate clear differences between firm–NFO collaboration and traditional interorganizational collaboration. We stress the boundaries of the relational view, suggest expanding its scope to capture the variety of firm–NFO collaborations, and propose ways of doing so.