Cooperative agreements and the theory of the firm: Focusing on barriers to change

Cooperative agreements between firms have become a significant phenomenon in the 1980s and have been analyzed by various approaches, including economics, organizational theory and business strategy. This paper draws on these different strands of the literature to argue that cooperative agreements have led to focus the analysis of firms' organization on the issue of change. As a consequence, cooperative agreements have contributed to recent developments of the theory of the firm in favor of competence-based and evolutionary approaches. The analysis is then extended to the case of multinational firms. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.