Airline alliances : When competitiveness can be approached with specific social networks

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present global airline alliances from a complementary and original angle to the existing works: “specific social networks”. “Social” as it is an inter‐organisational network through business relations between airline companies and “specific” as these are formal relations of contractual types (joint marketing, code sharing agreements, etc.). Design/methodology/approach – It is an empirical study, about cooperation agreements between global regular airlines, over a time period of six years from Airline Business Review database. The graph theory is used to measure social network and graphics representation for illustrations. Findings – The results show that there is a real process of social embeddedness correlated to the airline alliances members' experiences. Their structuring as networks varies in time following a life cycle and their specific morphologies affect their performance. Practical implications – The paper proposes numerous measures to approach the structure of airline alliances and graphics representations to illustrate networks. Originality/value – The paper draws a synthesis from the morphology and morphogenesis of airline alliances, proposing thereby some of their structural properties which have an impact on their competitiveness.