Competition in business networks

Abstract

Most of those who write about marketing or strategy appear to view competition as the overarching logic of business. Commentators have usually associated competition with improved economic efficiency and customer well-being: they have regarded it as “a good thing”, at least in the abstract or when it only affects others. In contrast to the widespread interest of other researchers and the preoccupations of managers with competition, researchers within the IMP tradition have devoted hardly any attention to the issue in over thirty years of research and the term occurs only infrequently in the IMP literature.This paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of the connections between competition and cooperation in business networks. In doing so, the paper also aims to provide an explanation for the lack of attention to the concept of competition from IMP literature by examining the value of competition as an explanatory variable in the interacted business landscape which has been the focus of IMP research. The paper starts by looking briefly at the points of origin of the interactive interpretation of business within earlier marketing and channel research as well as in earlier IMP empirical research. This research then forms the base from which we develop an analytical discussion of the explanatory value of the concept of competition in business network settings.