Samenvatting

Collaboration in organizations is not a new phenomenon indeed. Processes in organizations have always required collaboration and co-ordination between people, activities and departments. The last few years, however, there has also been increased co-operation between organizations, the so-called inter-organizational collaboration. This involves boundary-crossing collaboration, in which several organizations together make a product or create a service, share knowledge or make expertise available to each other. In the literature this phenomenon is known as network organizations (Nohria & Eccles, 1992; Jansen & Jägers,1995). We do not only find network organizations in commercial companies, but as often ingovernment organizations, where the participants may be government institutions/departments, and in organizations outside the government. The term is also used when it concerns the collaboration between (reasonably) autonomously operating departments of larger organizations, such as multinationals. Thus the collaboration between the AirMobile Brigade and the Tactical Helicopter Group (THG) is an example of inter-organizational collaboration in the armed forces.In this article the authors intend to present a vision on internal and external collaboration in the armed forces from the perspective of network organizations. By means of several points of interest in the recently published Defence Memorandum they will demonstrate that in a number of areas network-like organizations, in many variations, are emerging between armed forces, between services and between international organizations. A theoretical framework is presented for the positioning of the different types of networks. This framework will be applied to the armed forces and the authors conclude by indicating the significance of network organizations for them.