Issn 1535-6078

I treat the dynamics of interorganizational collaboration from a dialogue perspective. This extends the ‘exploitative’ and ‘explorative’ approaches that currently define scholarship on interorganizational collaboration. A dialogue perspective is argued to be particularly useful in understanding interorganizational efforts to tackle systemic issues that are technically as well as behaviorally complex, e.g., global warming. The concept of ‘dialogic capital’ is then introduced to theorize how, and by whom, the interorganizational dialogue is shaped in a context in which there is little formal authority among the participants. The process of accrual, leverage and growth/decline of dialogic capital is presented and implications for empirical research offered.