The formation of strategic alliances is clearly evident on the current organizational setting. It's one of the main strategies used by organizations that want to remain competitive. In this sense, this article aims to explain what are strategic alliances and what are the reasons why contemporary organizations form this kind of cooperative set, demonstrating its main characteristics and the advantages that can be achieved by establishing such alliances. Afterwards, an analysis on how the tendency of formation of strategic alliances can be understood is done according to two different theoretical approaches: the theory of resource dependency and the transaction costs theory. Therefore, it is intended to contextualize how and why these alliances are formed, trying to understand these theoretical approaches with the objective of verifying how they interpret this organizational phenomenon. Finally, this study tries to correlate how these approaches match in an attempt to clarify the reasons of forming cooperative sets.
strategic alliances; resource dependency theory; transaction costs theory