Quality and social capital management in technological alliances: a knowledge management view

Abstract

Literature has shown that cooperation through alliances is an interesting strategic decision, since it allows competitiveness, improves knowledge, innovative results and good performance. Several studies have focused on identifying the main factors affecting inter-firm cooperation. This paper aims to improve knowledge in this line of research with aspects less covered in the literature by examining empirically the relationship of technological cooperation alliances with quality and social capital management, differentiating between vertical, horizontal and institutional cooperation, according to the nature of the chosen partner. The analysis is developed with a sample of 1,848 companies in the manufacturing sector, using a binary logistic regression to evaluate the existence of dependency relationships between the analysed variables. Results show that there is a positive relationship between business cooperation and the implementation of quality controls in the case of cooperation with suppliers, customers and competitors; however, not so in the case of cooperation with institutions.