Strategic alliances in firm-centric and collective contexts : implications for indigenous entrepreneurship

How might diverse and often conflicting knowledge and belief structures and practices be mobilized into legitimate approaches for people looking to address the need for heightened responsible and sustainable entrepreneurial action by business organizations; humanizing the role of business in development? To answer this question, we explore two previously unconnected but aligned streams of literature: (i) work on strategic business alliances in general (R1); and (ii) work on corporate/Indigenous community partnerships specifically (R2). A systematic literature search identified 300 papers on the topics in total. We selected 39 general and 23 Indigenous-specific papers for review using a guiding classification matrix to determine principal themes and concepts. Both streams of literature were reviewed, and an approach was developed to identify areas where the empirical observation of Indigenous partnerships provides a contribution to the theory and practice of Indigenous entrepreneurship within the realm of strategic alliance formation, and vice versa. The paper concludes with a discussion of dissimilarities in the two streams of literature and maps out avenues for future research into strategic alliances involving corporate responsibility and sustainability (CRS), approaches based on Indigenous belief and value systems, and Indigenous entrepreneurship.