Strategic Management Journal Strat. Mgmt. J., 23: 881–901 (2002) Published online 2 July 2002 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/smj.260 AUTONOMY AND DEPENDENCE OF INTERNATIONAL COOPERATIVE VENTURES: AN EXPLORATION OF THE STRATEGIC PERFORMANCE OF U.S. VENTURES IN MEXICO JAMES A. ROBINS, 1 * STEPHEN TALLMAN 2 and KARIN FLADMOE-LINDQUIST 2 1 Department of Management, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 2 David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.A. Researchers have begun to view international cooperative ventures as complex, multiparty organizations in which foreign and local firms and the venture itself all have distinctive roles. This approach has important implications for the venture strategies of foreign firms in emerging economies. This study explores relationships between the resource contributions of parent firms and U.S. managers’ assessment of venture performance in a sample of established U.S.–Mexican ventures. The research suggests that mature cooperative ventures are expected to achieve autonomy from parent firms in key areas at the same time that certain forms of strategic dependency also are important to success. Copyright  2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Research on international cooperative strategies has evolved rapidly since the Second World War. Early postwar studies focused on the multinational corporation, treating cooperative strategies as the outcome of investment restrictions and host coun- try partners as generic representatives of local mar- kets. Macroeconomic theories provided the basis for many of these studies, and research typically emphasized patterns of corporate expansion from home markets (Caves, 1971; Hymer, 1960; Kindle- berger, 1969; Vernon, 1971). A view of cooperative strategies as partner- ships in which both foreign and host country firms play significant roles emerged in the 1980s. As studies of international ventures began to give the host country partner an independent identity, organizational and strategic theories also took on greater importance. Topics such as partial inter- nalization, joint venturing, strategic motives for alliance formation, and partner selection became Key words: cooperative ventures; Mexico; international strategy; resource-based strategy; emerging economy *Correspondence to: James A. Robins, Department of Man- agement, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong. central research concerns (Contractor and Lorange, 1988; Geringer, 1988). In the last decade there has been growing recog- nition that cooperative strategies can be viewed as more than just partnerships between a host country organization and a foreign firm. A view has begun to emerge of international cooperative ventures as three-party organizations in which foreign and local firms — and the venture itself — all are seen as having distinctive, interdependent roles (Lorange, 1996). Although a good deal of empirical work has been done on cooperative strategies (Beamish and Killing, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c), this three-party per- spective has not been used to examine strategies for emerging economies. Many fundamental ques- tions about the ways that interrelationships among participants may influence the success of interna- tional cooperative strategies remain to be explored. This study uses the concept that cooperative ventures can be treated as three-party arrange- ments to analyze cooperative strategies of U.S. firms in Mexico. The study examines the roles that managers in U.S. firms see for their own firms, their Mexican partners, and their coopera- tive ventures, and it analyzes the impact of those interrelationships on strategic performance. The Copyright  2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 8 July 1999 Final revision received 26 March 2002