EXPRESS: Mobilizing the Temporary Organization: The Governance Roles of Selection and Pricing

Many marketing transactions between buyers and suppliers involve short-term collaborations or so-called temporary organizations. Such organizations have considerable value-creation potential, but also face challenges, as evidenced by their mixed performance records. One particular challenge involves relationship governance, and in this respect, temporary organizations represent a conundrum: On the one hand, they pose significant governance problems, due to the need to manage numerous independent specialists under time constraints. At the same time, temporary organizations lack the inherent governance properties of other organizational forms like permanent organizations. The authors conduct an empirical study of 429 business-to-business (B2B) construction projects designed to answer two specific questions: First, how are particular selection and pricing strategies deployed in response to monitoring and coordination problems? Second, does the joint alignment between the two mechanisms and their respective attributes help mitigate cost overruns? We follow up our formal hypotheses tests with a series of in-depth interviews to explore and to gain insight into the validity of our key constructs, explanatory mechanisms, and outcomes. Managerially, the authors answer the long-standing question of how to mobilize a temporary organization. Theoretically, they develop an augmented “discriminating alignment” heuristic for relationship management involving multiple governance mechanisms and attributes.

ON THE ALIGNMENT PROBLEM

This paper deals with the problem of aligning data and computations when mapping uniform or affine loop nests onto SPMD distributed memory parallel computers. For affine loop nests we formulate the problem by introducing the communication graph, which can be viewed as the counterpart for the mapping problem of the dependence graph for scheduling. We illustrate the approach with several examples to show the difficulty of the problem. In the simplest case, that of perfect loop nests with uniform dependences, we show that minimizing the number of communications is NP-complete, although we are able to derive a good alignment heuristic in most practical cases.