Cooperative Opportunity Evaluation Based On Structural Control In The Strategic Alliances

Great unprecedented changes have taken place in the structure of enterprises in the process of adapting to the dramatic changes and strengthening the organization flexibility, along with the new modern administrative approaches of enterprise rebuilding, enterprising reorganizing, and learning organization . The new enterprise modality, based on the strategy of skills learning, such as strategic alliance, virtual enterprises, network organization, correspondingly form and develop rapidly. At the meantime, so does the corporation governance mechnism on the basis of the separation of ownership and operation's right in the modern enterprise. However, what are the influences of the organizational control factors, including organizational structure and corporation governance mechnism,on the strategic choice and implementation? And what is their significance? Since Alfred D.Chandler (1962) [1] put forward his famous theory of "Strategy determines structure, structure follows strategy" forty years ago, the relation between strategy and structure has always been the subject which most interests the researchers. Different from the Chandler's conclusion, this article holds that the relation between strategy and structure will become increasingly complicate as the form of enterprises shifts to strategic alliance or virtual enterprises and the boundary among them is also blurred. So this article evaluates the opportunity of strategic cooperation with the structural control index (including organizational structure and corporation governance mechanism) based on the interpretation of the "counter-reaction "of structure on strategy (especially the strategic choice). This is part of the project of National Natural Science Foundation of China------"the cooperative opportunity evaluation and prospect description in strategic alliance based on skills "(Ratification No. 70272066), undertaken by my tutor. Of course, we follow the consistent supposition of the mission of enterprise in classical economics and take performance variation as the primary index describing the opportunity of cooperation. Thus the mechanism for evaluating the opportunity of strategic cooperation based on structural control can be summarized as: obtaining the relevant data about the enterprises which have established strategic cooperation through questionnaire, probing into and testing and verifying the relation between the degree of enterprise structural control and cooperation performance with the application of Cross-Validation and Structural Equation Modeling; on top of that, analyzing how and how much factor of structural control can influence cooperation performance, and then reaching the conclusion of the evaluation of the opportunity of strategic cooperation based on structural control.It is rare to probe into the performance of strategic cooperation and to evaluate the opportunity of cooperation in a special perspective of structural control in the field of strategic administration both home and abroad. So, this article is pioneering in this field with imaginable hardship. If this article can create a new approach to evaluating the opportunity of strategic cooperation and draw the experts and enterprise circle to the significance of structural control, it is best rewarded. In reality, the "structure crisis", encountered by most large enterprises practicing international strategy in our country nowadays, has confirmed the value of the research introduced in this article.