Management control patterns in joint venture relationships: A model and an exploratory study

Abstract

Joint ventures provide advantages to parent companies, for instance by gaining quick access to new resources. However, their shared ownership gives rise to complexities involving control issues. We propose an integrated model of joint venture control, which adds relational issues to the TCE framework. By combining transaction and relational characteristics, we argue that three different management control patterns can be distinguished: a content-based control pattern, a consultation-based control pattern, and a context-based control pattern. We empirically examine these three patterns by conducting two exploratory case studies.