Causal Analysis of Interorganizational Relations: An Axiomatic Theory Revised.

This research was performed by Iowa State University, Department of Sociology pursuant to contract number PH86-68-1 29 with the United States Public Health Service. Although the entire project is summarized in Klonglan et al. (1 971), the conclusions of this paper are the author's who participated in the project as a task coordinator. This paper presents an empirical analysis and conceptual extension of the work of Aiken and Hage. This work was accomplished by (1) constructing a causal model of organizational determinants of interorganizational relationships from an integration of two of their published sets of propositions; (2) testing symmetrical and asymmetrical versions of the model through analyses of data collected from 138 health and welfare organizations; (3) revising the model for theoretically inconsistent findings. The revised model of eight independent variables accounts for about 1/3 of the variance in interorganizational relations and calls into question several classical assumptions of organizational theory.