Organization Theory and Cooperation and Conflict Among International Organizations

Abstract

This chapter considers how International Relations (IR) theory and organization theory (OT) have informed each other’s development to date and discusses areas of unrealized potential for future cross-fertilization in analyzing inter-organizational cooperation and conflict as well as limits of such exchange. While IR has made limited contributions to organizational studies, the flow of ideas from organizational scholarship to IR has been more influential. Organizational theories such as transaction cost economics, agency theory, and neo-institutionalist organizational sociology have significantly influenced IR theory over the past 30 years. Network analysis is increasingly employed in IR. Complexity theory has seen some application in both IR and OT. And scholars of international organizations have recently drawn upon resource dependence theory and organization culture theory. Other organizational theories—including contingency, garbage can, and organizational ecology, theories—have the potential to illuminate new puzzles in the study of inter-organizational relations in world politics.