Strategic partnerships in the domestic textile industry.

摘要

The purpose of this study was to examine the structure and nature of strategic partnerships currently in use by members of the domestic textile industry. The specific research objectives of the study were: (1) to obtain demographic information about textile companies who were engaged in strategic partnerships and their partners, (2) to create a descriptive profile of these strategic partnerships, and (3) to investigate the relationship between social value, economic value, relational distance and fairness in two research equations.; Data were collected via a self-administered written or internet questionnaire. Respondents were employed by apparel related textile manufacturing firms with domestic headquarters and more than 25 employees. Eligible firms were identified from two directories: Davison's Texile Blue Book (2001) and The Official North American Textile Red Book (2001). A total of 555 respondents received the first mailing of the prenotification letter. Forty-five companies that were no longer in business were deleted from the sample, resulting in a final sample size of 510 companies. The overall response rate was 93 returned surveys, or 18.2% of the sample. Of the returned surveys, 36 responses, or 7.1% of the total sample had strategic partnerships in place and were used in data analysis.; A statistical path model was developed for the study based on the Relationship Retention Model proposed by Gassenheimer and Houston (1998) which illustrated two different regression equations used in analysis. The independent variables used in the first equation were economic value (mean = 37.5) and social value (mean = 52.53), and the dependent variable was relationship distance, a dichotomous variable. The independent variables used in the second equation were economic value, social value and relational distance, and the dependent variable was fairness (mean = 25.94). Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression was run on each model, and bootstrapping procedures were run on the sample to confirm results. One significant relationship (beta = 0.6837; p .0001) was found in the second regression equation between social value and fairness. These results were unchanged in a reduced model that included only these two variables.