he key to understanding the lobbying activities of business interests in the European institutions is to conceive of the relation between these private and public actors as an exchange relation between two groups of interdependent organizations (for a more detailed discussion of how exchange theory and resource dependence constitute the foundations of the new theory of access, see Bouwen 2002: 368). It is a mistake to regard business lobbying as a unidirectional activity of private actors vis-à-vis the EU institutions. It needs to be recognized that the EU institutions are eager to interact because they need close contacts with the private sector in order to fulfill their institutional role.
The exchange models developed by sociologists in the 1960s for the study of inter-organizational relationships serve as an interesting starting point for the analysis of the interaction between business interests and public actors at the European level (Blau 1964; Levine & White 1961: 587). Some authors have already used exchange theories – either implicitly (Greenwood et al. 1992) or explicitly (Buholzer 1998; Pappi & Henning 1999) – to study European interest intermediation. According to these theories, the interaction between private and public organizations can be conceptualized as a series of inter-organizational exchanges. These models are closely related to the resource dependence perspective of Pfeffer and Salancik (1978). Whereas both theoretical approaches emphasize that it is important for organizations to exchange resources, resource dependency focuses more closely on the ensuing interdependence between the interacting organizations (Pfeffer 1997: 63). According to the resource dependence perspective, organizations are not internally self-sufficient (Aldrich & Pfeffer 1976: 83). They require resources from the environment, and therefore have to interact with those organizations or groups in the environment that control the resources they need (Pfeffer & Salancik 1978: 258). In the context of the EU decision-making process, private and public actors become interdependent because they need resources from each other.