5. Discussion and implications
On many fronts, our understanding of mechanisms that reduce opportunism in IJVs has been enriched by the work of innovative scholars in the areas of management and international business. This includes research involving structural mechanisms to reduce opportunism (e.g., Das & Rahman, 2010; Hennart & Zeng, 2005; Luo, 2007a; Parkhe, 1993; Zeng, 1998; Zhang & Rajagopalan, 2002) and social mechanisms to reduce opportunism (e.g., Deeds & Hill, 1998; Kale et al., 2000; Wathne & Heide, 2000). Yet the scholarly work on the mechanisms to reduce opportunism has been fragmented, in that prior empirical studies have mainly focused on either the structural or social mechanisms and have analysed limited number of mechanisms. Furthermore, prior empirical studies have not investigated the interactions between structural and social mechanisms in reducing opportunism. In this research, we sought to move beyond the conventional focus of prior scholarly work that either focused on structural or social mechanisms to reduce opportunism. Extending earlier work on the topic, we developed an integrated framework of reducing opportunism that comprises three structural mechanisms of symmetric dependence, symmetric equity share, and resource complementarity from TCE and three social mechanisms of trust, communication, and cultural adaptation from SET, and empirically tested their main and interaction effects in reducing opportunism. Thus, we advance the early works of Deeds and Hill (1998), Hennart and Zeng (2005), Luo (2007a), Parkhe (1993), Zeng (1998). Zhang and Rajagopalan (2002), Kale et al. (2000) and Wathne and Heide (2000) in two specific ways: (1) by developing an integrated framework for reducing opportunism in which both the three structural mechanisms from TCE and the three social mechanisms from SET are incorporated, and (2) by empirically testing the interaction effects between structural and social mechanisms in their relation to opportunism in IJVs.
