Inter-organizational relations as an emerging subfield

As an academic discipline, international relations (IR) is state-centric by definition. It is about relations between nations organized in or as states. Consequently, it has always been good advice for those interested in studying IR to focus on states and their relations. In the early 1990s, however, a common understanding gained acceptance in IR that the political world is no longer just a world of states but of societies – a gesellschaftswelt (Rosenau, 1992). For more than 30 years, the study of non-state entities has become quite prominent in IR, be it of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), multinational enterprises (MNEs) or other organized forms of representation. The focus of this research is often on relations between states and non-state entities and their impact on each other. It has been only in the past 15 years that IR scholars have started to analyse relations among non-state entities. With a strong focus on IGOs, this subfield was labelled inter-organizational relations. While inter-organizational relations (IOR) may not have joined the discipline's mainstream yet, there is a visible and growing group of scholars researching this topic and translating its importance into multiple research questions.

As a consequence, the subfield of IOR has developed and matured since its creation. This came at a price, though. In the early days, scholars experimented with various theoretical and methodological approaches to study specific cases of IOR. In the recent past, this experimental period was replaced by a tendency to conformity and canonization. This tendency is not only expressed in a concentration on certain theories, methods, organization types and policy fields, but also in a binary understanding of the nature of relations. In theoretical terms, those interested in enquiring into IOR prefer rationalist approaches such as resource dependence and regime complexity (both to be discussed later). Methodological issues are hardly reflected upon explicitly, so most studies can be described, at best, as based on content analysis. There is also an inclination towards studying relations among IGOs or between IGOs and NGOs, mostly those dealing with security or economic policies. Moreover, inter-organizational relations are usually conceptualized in a binary way as being either cooperative or conflictive/competitive.