The Role of Political Approach in Developing Strategic Collaboration among Technology-oriented Companies: an Institutional Perspective

The strategic collaboration is an effective way to promote companies' competitiveness, especially technology-oriented SMEs. However, it is not possible to collaborate in this way without considering the institutional environment. This study aimed to investigate the role of political approach in performing strategic collaboration among technology-oriented companies from the viewpoint of institutional theory. To do so, the present study has evaluated the role of political approach in strategic collaboration in regard to four aspects of legal, financial, trust, and value system.

The strategic collaboration is considered as a response to the company's environment. This type of collaboration is a formal/informal agreement among different firms in the form of alliances, joint ventures, or business networks. In each form of these collaborations, partners may come across institutional factors that affect the common performance. In the relationship between the parties, institutional factors establish some guidelines and external constraints affecting the exploitation of collaborative opportunitiesParticularly, the institutional theory is useful in explaining how organizations respond to external pressures and develop appropriate strategies to cope with the environment and its institutional requirements. Scholars have used different constructs to explain institutional requirements. However, they identified four categories of institutional factors as the basis for companies' economic behaviors and strategic collaborations: legal system, financial system, value system, and trust and authority relationships. Legitimacy is a key issue in the institutional perspective. Searching for legitimacy is a means by which companies moderate the effect of environmental restrictions and make it an advantage in their favor. From this point of view, adopting institutionalized measures and incorporating the external demands of powerful actors such as governance or culture, a strategic collaboration provides different parties with legitimacy.