27 The Field of Inter‐organizational Relations: A Jungle or an Italian Garden?

Steve Cropper is Professor in Management at the Centre for Health Planning and Management and first Director of the Institute for Public Policy and Management at Keele University, UK. His research concerns strategy making, decision support and inter-agency collaborative working in health and public services, working closely with policy makers and practitioners. He is inaugural chair of an advisory committee for the National Health Service's 'Research for Patient Benefit' programme. Current research projects are tracing the formation and development, over time, of partnerships and networks in community and health care settings using ethnographic, process evaluation and action research. He is co-editor of three other books and author of a series of papers on collaborative inter-organizational processes. He is a steering group member and former convenor of the Special Interest Group on Inter-Organizational Relations of the British Academy of Management.

Mark Ebers is Professor of Business Administration, Corporate Development and Organization, at Cologne University, Germany, since 2004. He has been International Visiting Fellow at the Advanced Institute of Management (AIM, UK) in 2006, visiting professor at Tilburg University (2004), Harvard Business School (2002), Harvard University (1997), and Bocconi University (1996). In 1989/90 he was a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at Harvard University. He has edited The Formation of Inter-Organizational Networks (OUP, 1997), co-edited a Special Issues of International Studies of Management & Organization on industry networks (vol. 27, no. 4, 1997-98), and has published a number of articles on inter-organizational relations. He is co-founder and co-organizer of the EGOS Standing Working Group on Business Networks, and has convened sub-themes on inter-organizational relations at five EGOS colloquia.

Chris Huxham is a Senior Fellow of the ESRC /EPSRC Advanced Institute of Management Research, Professor of Management at the University of Strathclyde Business School and Chair of the British Academy of Management. She has been researching in this area for more than 17 years and has a large number of publications in the area. She has three times received awards from the Academy of Management for articles based on this work. This work is brought together in her book, Managing to Collaborate: the Theory and Practice of Collaborative Advantage (Routledge, 2005). She is editor of Creating Collaborative Advantage (Sage, 1996), which brought together contributions from authors in the United States and Europe. She was Founding Convenor of the British Academy of Management's Special Interest Group on Inter-Organizational Relations and co-founder of the annual International Conference on Multi-organizational Partnerships, Alliances and Networks (MOPAN), now in its fourteenth year.

Peter Smith Ring has been a faculty member at Loyola Marymount University since 1990, and Professor of Strategic Management since 1994. Previously, he was an Associate Professor on the faculty at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. Professor Ring has been engaged in the study of cooperative inter-organizational relationships since 1984. His research focuses on networks and strategic alliances, the processes for managing strategic alliances, the role of trust in inter-organizational relationships, and public sector-private sector collaboration. The results of this research have been published in a number of leading journals as well as in a number of chapters in research monographs. Professor Ring has been a Fulbright Scholar at Nanyang Business School, Republic of Singapore and a visiting research scholar and/or visiting professor at a wide range of leading international universities.