Emergent Coopetitive and Cooperative Strategies in Inter-organizational relationships: Empirical Evidence from Australian and Italian Operas

Drawing on the acknowledged distinction between deliberate and emergent strategies, this chapter focuses on the formation of both coopetition and cooperation as unintended and therefore emergent strategies. More precisely, multiple case studies have been conducted on two different consortium of opera companies, one in Australia and the other in Italy, in order to elucidate the role played by the institutional environment in triggering both cooperative and coopetitive strategies. The goal is to demonstrate that coopetition and cooperation can result from an unintended strategic process induced by the external institutional environment. This chapter offers some advances to the literature on coopetition. On the one hand, it deepens the analysis on the generative processes of coopetitive strategies, introducing the distinction between imposed cooperation and induced coopetition. On the other hand, similarities and differences between emergent cooperative and coopetitive strategies originated both in the Australian and in the Italian contexts are presented and examined in terms of strategic learning, drawing implications for both management and cultural policy makers. The chapter consists of six sections. Section two reviews the literature on coopetition strategy and the distinction between deliberate and emergent strategies. The third section illustrates the research setting and describes the qualitative research methodology. The fourth and fifth sections present the main events and environmental changes that have contributed to shaping the decisions of respectively the Australian and Italian opera companies under consideration. The sixth and last section draws the main implications stemming from the analysis, and discusses the main limitations of the study.