Industrial Marketing And Purchasing Research Articles

Sustainable supply chain management when focal firms are complex: a network perspective

The purpose of the paper is to generate an understanding of the prerequisites for sustainable supply chain management. A common tendency in the literature is to see sustainable supply chain management as something that is undertaken by a focal firm at the end of the chain. Even though many scholars point to the need for cooperative approaches, focal firms are still considered to manage supply chains from one fixed and coherent vantage point: the managerial outlook of the focal firm itself, understood as a structurally coherent, top-down controlled unit. Through an illustration from the Swedish retail sector, we argue that such a vantage point is problematic. We suggest a deeper analysis of focal firms and sustainable supply chain management in terms of a network perspective employed mainly in the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) literature. The adopted network perspective recognizes both internal and external complexity of sustainable supply chain management, implying, for example, difficulties to control entire organizations and the existence of multiple supply chains to manage. It is also suggested that sustainable supply networks may be a viable concept to use when dealing with sustainability issues related to production, since it relates sustainability in the supply chain to the more general responsibility context of firms.

The influence of network effects on SME performance

The notions that firms are embedded within complex networks, and that managers spend time actively networking, have long been accepted by scholars within the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) Group. However, an issue that has not received the same attention is an assessment of how these two facets; network structure and external networking behaviors affect SME performance. In assessing their antecedents, in this research we move beyond the traditional IMP literature, using emotional intelligence and entrepreneurial style to assess CEOs' managerial style. Network structure was assessed by the extent to which structural holes and degrees of centrality were present. Data was collected from 227 CEOs of small Iranian information technology companies. To test our hypotheses, we combined the use of structural equation modeling and social network analysis — a dual methodology that has not been adopted before. The results show that emotional intelligence drives entrepreneurial style, network structure and external networking behavior. SME performance is influenced by both network structure and external networking behavior. The mediating role of network structure is also discussed. Here our results show that entrepreneurial style does not influence external networking behavior. Several managerial implications of these findings are discussed.

The Interactive Constitution of Actors in Industrial Networks: The Case of the Norwegian City of Ålesund

The actor-dimension of the Activitiy-Resource-Actor (ARA)-model has not gained the same attention among Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) scholars as the resource and activity dimensions. However, the issue of what an actor actually is, in the sense of its interactive constitution, is important from an industrial marketing and purchasing perspective that emphasizes the interactive character of the business landscape. This is adressed in this paper. As a concequence of their interactive constitution, actors come in many forms and they are never pre-determined but rather continuously forged out of interactions. In this paper, the Activity-Resource-Actor-model is used to illustrate how actors are forged by interaction and to explore interaction-patterns around an actor of an unusual shape: A city. The purpose is to explore the small world of a city as a business actor and to illustrate the multi-level and variable character of actors. The paper concludes with a definition of what is termed interactive actors.

How can business buyers attract sellers' resources?: Empirical evidence for preferred customer treatment from suppliers

This paper describes a study that investigates what makes a buyer attractive to a seller in a business-to-business buyer–seller relationship and encourages the seller to commit to and invest resources preferentially in the relationship. The study helps answer the question, “What is it that the buyer needs to do to create this attractiveness?” The perspective is somewhat unusual in the marketing literature for two reasons. Firstly, because it investigates how the supplier perspective of customer financial attractiveness affects the attitudes and actions of the supplier towards the buyer, rather than taking the buyer's perspective across the relationship. Secondly, the study has relationship attractiveness in terms of financial performance as an antecedent of its relationship constructs, whereas most relationship studies investigate performance as an outcome. The paper develops a model that proposes the seller's perception of customer financial attractiveness, seller satisfaction, and seller commitment as drivers of the seller's preferred customer treatment by allocation of resources to the relationship. The bases for the study's model are the resource-based view of the firm, the industrial marketing and purchasing (IMP) models, and related resource-focused theoretical streams. The study finds support for the model in the analysis of survey data.

Tourism Experience Network: Co‐creation of Experiences in Interactive Processes

ABSTRACTThis article launches a new framework, the Tourism Experience Network (TEN), which explores co‐creation of experiences. The TEN framework absorbs value as experience logic in tourism marketing. Its uniqueness illustrates structuring processes and includes consumers/tourists in the service management. A theoretical explorative technique based on literature was used to construct the TEN. It departures from interactive networks, new service paradigm and tourism marketing, and contributes to tourism experience theories. Inspiration from the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group was embraced to modify issues inherent from traditional networks—the ARA model. By linking this approach with experience, actors are defined as experience facilitators in tourism and networks. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Reciprocal value propositions in practice: Constraints in digital markets

The value proposition concept, while forming a central foundational premise of service-dominant (S-D) logic, has nevertheless been treated somewhat ambiguously. Recent work in attempting to address this has focused through a S-D logic lens on the reciprocal nature of value propositions. Important to this work has been a focus on communicative interactions and resource integration between network suppliers and customers. Overall, value proposition thinking has not studied in detail their adoption and use in practice. Considering the compelling notion of reciprocity, there have been recent calls for research to consider reciprocal value propositions in practice. The overall aim of this paper, therefore, was to explore how reciprocal value propositions are developed (or not) in practice at the network level. The study was set in the mobile television (TV) sector, which, as an internet-driven sector, is viewed as particularly pertinent. To conduct the study an S-D logic and Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) Group framework are integrated for the first time. A key finding is that while the reciprocal value proposition concept is theoretically intuitive, it is by no means inevitable in practice. Reciprocal value propositions were found to be simultaneously constrained, and, potentially enabled by these constraints in practice. At an overall level this paper contributes to the ongoing collaborative process, which aims to move S-D logic from a framework to a theory. More specifically, we provide new insights into the development of reciprocal value propositions in practice.

A NICE agenda for IMP research

The IMP (Industrial Marketing and Purchasing) Group has engaged in a number of interesting developments in the past few years. Particularly adventurous have been the agendas of ‘pictures’ and sense-making and of time. In this paper we argue that borrowing and combining contemporary foci within social science on narratives, identity, culture and epoché temporality (for which we use the acronym N.I.C.E) allows the construction of an approach that can integrate these IMP agendas into a new research direction for the group that will keep it at the leading edge of marketing research. The purpose of our paper is to introduce and integrate discursive and temporal elements into the understanding and research of business networks to develop a more dynamic and hermeneutic approach. Our purpose is to provide a contribution to the field in exploring how identities are formed within business networks through narrative episodes in interconnecting relationships over time. We bring together all of the elements of a NICE agenda in an attempt to provide an integrative, ‘multi-lens’ theory of business networks focussed within the IMP research tradition. In doing so, we construct meaning as itself networked; sense-making involves relating presently narrated episodes to symbolic and material aspects of other narrative network episodes and events through emplotment and storying.

SO YOU ALREADY HAVE A SURVEY DATABASE?-A SEVEN-STEP METHODOLOGY FOR THEORY BUILDING FROM SURVEY DATABASES: AN ILLUSTRATION FROM INCREMENTAL INNOVATION GENERATION IN BUYER-SELLER RELATIONSHIPS

Across business disciplines, the importance of database research for theory testing continues to increase. The availability of data also has increased, though methods to analyze and interpret these data lag. This research proposes a method for extracting strong measures from survey databases by a progression from qualitative to quantitative techniques. To test the proposed method, this study uses the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) survey database, which includes data from firms in several European countries. The proposed method consists of two phases and seven steps, as illustrated in the context of the firm's incremental innovation generation for buyer–seller relationships. This systematic progression moves from a broad but valid empirical case study to the development of a narrow and reliable measure of incremental innovation generation in the IMP database. The proposed method can use supply chain survey databases for theory development without requiring primary data collection, assuming certain conditions.

From “taking” network pictures to “making” network pictures

PurposeAn earlier researcher, Wood, proposed that cinema is the most appropriate metaphor for interpretation of contemporary life and organizations. The paper adopts the enthusiasm for the cinema metaphor and explores the implications for industrial marketing and business networks, with particular reference to the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) Group research.Design/methodology/approachThe paper outlines the Cartesian picture theory of the early Wittgenstein, the comparable “pictures agenda” within the IMP, then the post‐Cartesian “language gaming” approach adopted by the later Wittgenstein, and associates it with an agenda to introduce a more “cinematographic” approach, introducing issues within the “linguistic turn” to the study of business networks.FindingsThe transformation of the contemporary “post‐Cartesian” culture from “written” to “visual” was not fully appreciated until the invention and mass appeal of cinema and the concomitants of a visual culture became more apparent. In the notion of the “spectacle”, Debord was amongst the first to show that the postmodern visual culture was one where social relations are dominated by commodified images. The images that prevail, from this critical viewpoint, are “social opiates” masquerading as progress that control actors through addictive consumption and acquisition by spectator consumers. In this context, business to business relationships are about how these image‐based addictions are maintained within business cultures.Research limitations/implicationsThe adoption of a cinematographic metaphor would appear to be a pertinent development for understanding of business network relationships.Originality/valueThe advantage of a cinematographic metaphor over other, less visual, metaphors is that cinema is more visually sophisticated and entirely embedded in cultures dominated by commodified images. It is appropriate, therefore, that visual literacy, realities as increasingly “image‐dominated” and “virtual” business networks are better understood through the lens of a cinematographic metaphor.

IMP and service-dominant logic: Divergence, convergence and development

This article arose directly from discussions at the 2nd Otago Forum on Service-Dominant (S-D) logic held at the University of Otago in December 2008. It builds on the papers presented and discussions at the forum, on previous papers within the S-D logic field and relates these to the research of the IMP (Industrial Marketing and Purchasing) Group. The article focuses on two important conceptual issues that appear to need further development by both S-D logic and IMP researchers: Firstly, the identity and characteristics of the business actor in an interacted business landscape and second, the nature of value and its creation and delivery. The article also seeks to use some IMP ideas on business interaction in an attempt to refine and clarify the central S-D logic concept of ‘service’ between companies. Finally, the article attempts throughout to draw tentative conclusions about the implications of this conceptual analysis for practitioners.

Pricing Third-Party Logistics Services: Integrating Insights from the Logistics and Industrial Services Literature

Abstract As the logistics services outsourced by companies increase in scope and complexity, the challenge of designing appropriate contracts grows. Here, the price model, which determines the remuneration, takes a central position. In practice, however, the agreed-upon contracts often fail to govern the relationship and set wrong or misleading incentives for either or both of the involved parties. In order to provide a conceptual basis and to identify promising avenues for future research in the increasingly important field of pricing third-party logistics services, this article provides a comprehensive review of the existing literature on logistics and industrial service pricing using a refined version of the established Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group relationship management framework.

Pricing Third-Party Logistics Services: Integrating Insights from the Logistics and Industrial Services Literature

Abstract As the logistics services outsourced by companies increase in scope and complexity, the challenge of designing appropriate contracts grows. Here, the price model, which determines the remuneration, takes a central position. In practice, however, the agreed-upon contracts often fail to govern the relationship and set wrong or misleading incentives for either or both of the involved parties. In order to provide a conceptual basis and to identify promising avenues for future research in the increasingly important field of pricing third-party logistics services, this article provides a comprehensive review of the existing literature on logistics and industrial service pricing using a refined version of the established Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group relationship management framework.

Modeling the synergy level in a vertical collaborative supply chain through the IMP interaction model and DEA framework

This work develops a mathematical programming model that characterizes the main variables present in the interaction dynamics of each agent in a collaborative vertical logistical system, such as a supply chain, and measures the synergy level of such system. The model is based on the interaction model developed by the IMP (Industrial Marketing and Purchasing) group and also on the DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) framework. The basics of these two approaches allow modeling of the characteristics of an agent as well as the collaborative relationships with other agents within the chain. The model was validated using information of supply chain of leather and its products, classified by DANE (Departamento Nacional de Estadistica—Colombia) as the sector CIIU323.

The relevance of the organisational and geographical dimensions in business networks

This is a conceptual effort to develop the network perspective in use within the industrial marketing and purchasing (IMP) research tradition by integrating findings from international business (IB) research. An analytical framework to study business network in an international context is developed by considering the implications of the organisational and geographical dimensions of networks. This framework and analytical approach offer broader means of analysis and it also helps tackling network effects and dynamics related to cross-country activities of multinational firms. In relation to the framework a series of propositions and issues for future research are also presented.

Capabilities exchange through business interaction: An empirical investigation of a client–IT supplier relationship

This article focuses on the opportunities for capabilities exchange within a specific business-to-business context: the relationship between a client and an information technology (IT) supplier. Research on the features of this type of relationship, although fairly extensive, has focused on IT implementation issues, relationship between IT resources, organisation performance and competitive advantage, IT outsourcing relationships and definition of IT capabilities. However, our understanding of the context where IT capabilities are exchanged within consultancy projects and how this exchange emerges is rather limited. The paper aims to bridge this gap by adopting the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group's interaction approach as a tool for conducting an in-depth investigation of a case study to analyse the context, the parties and the interactions through which IT capabilities are exchanged. The research reveals that interpersonal relationships between users and consultants within consultancy projects are crucial to establish a long-lasting and stable relationship. As a result, during consultancy projects IT-related resources, in the form of IT physical infrastructures, human IT resources and IT intangible resources are exchanged and combined to create or enhance IT capabilities. Furthermore, we also claim that the success of such an exchange depends very much on the degree of social and interpersonal exchange.

Paradoxes and guanxi dilemmas in emerging Chinese–Western intercultural relationships

Three paradoxes have been revealed in the study of business networks by Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) researchers. These are: seeking opportunities and then facing limitations, influencing others and yet being influenced in turn, and controlling and yet being out of control in network situations. These paradoxes have previously received little critical evaluation. This article investigates these paradoxes through in depth interviews with twenty-two business managers in Chinese–Western intercultural relationships. Three specific dilemmas relating to the fundamental Chinese cultural principle of guanxi are revealed. These dilemmas are: dilemmas between strong personal ties (guanxi) and weak personal ties, dilemmas between previous understandings and new learning of guanxi ties, and conflicting obligations between inner and outer circles of guanxi networks. These guanxi dilemmas occur in emerging Chinese–Western intercultural networks, irrespective of the specific cultural variations, contractual constraints, or corporate policies applying. This paper identifies a need for more acute study of guanxi cultural norms and their behavioral consequences in emerging Chinese–Western intercultural relationships, given the rise of China in the global economy.

Rethinking language in IMP research: Networking processes in other words

Summary This paper explores the challenges of applying concepts from the “linguistic turn” in the social sciences to Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) theory. We discuss some key consequences for IMP researchers of rethinking their approach to language. This involves an acknowledgement that language has a reality constituting and distorting character. It also affords the realization that when phenomena are couched “in other words”, they appear differently to us. We shall argue that this realization allows the inspirational potential of creating, through the use of new language, a new and possibly better understanding of the complexities of business networks. The potentials and practicalities in industrial network scholars accommodating language and communication are discussed in the context of selected approaches from the linguistic turn, such as certain variants of discourse analysis, which offer promising developments for research. We conclude that these potentials may enable IMP researchers to benefit from adopting the metaphysics of change, a process epistemology, the ontology of “becoming” and a more reflexive and intimate engagement with practice.

The key capabilities required for managing tourism business networks

This article applies the IMP (Industrial Marketing and Purchasing) Group approach to the analysis of the coordination of cooperative activities. It challenges the sustainability of the ‘manipulating’ demand approach in favor of the Value System Continuum in tourism business networks. It is hypothesized that local tourism businesses must develop new key capabilities in order to face future global competition. The study uses case methodology and in-depth interviews to examine organizational realities as a product of the subjective enactments or social constructions of individual actors through the perceptions of two coordinators. The case-analysis findings identify the coordination of cooperative activities in tourism business networks as a prerequisite for (1) enhancing the value-creation process, and (2) building the brand-identity process across the network. The empirical evidence in the article is limited to one country. Future work will broaden the study context by including the analysis of international networks.

Business to business relationships: the paradox of network constraints?

The marketing significance of consumer and business relationships was reclaimed in the 1990s when relationship marketing came into its own as a field of marketing inquiry. This article contributes to the current debate about the scope of relationship marketing and especially the meaning of network relationships. This question is discussed in a business to business context, using the network approach of the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group as a lens. We critique three relationship ‘paradoxes’ (Håkansson and Ford, 2002) which appear to place limits on managerial action in networks. These paradoxes are considered from alternative viewpoints in order to attempt a resolution to the logical conundrum they present. We conclude that Håkansson and Ford's paradoxes indeed signal a range of constraints on managerial independence but the situation is far from paradoxical. We offer suggestions for cognitive mapping of relationships within the knowable network at the level of the firm and call for an ontological shift in understanding firm-level strategies in the network context.

Supply relationship evaluation:: The relationship assessment process (RAP) and beyond

In this article we argue that the common purchasing and supply management practice of evaluating supplier performance may be inappropriate in situations of supply partnerships, as it focuses on evaluating the performance of the supplier rather than the supply relationship. We explore a conceptual framework for supply relationship evaluation, discussing lessons from past attempts to develop relationship evaluation models, focusing particularly on the so-called Relationship Assessment Process (RAP) model (Lamming et al., 1996). The article critically evaluates the RAP model, discussing experiences of implementation from 1995 onwards. Building on the reflections on RAP, we propose a new conceptual framework for supply relationship evaluation. This is constructed on the basis of a synthesis of literatures grounded predominantly in industrial marketing and purchasing (IMP), and purchasing and supply management (PSM) research, and thus adopts a network rather than a dyadic perspective on relationship evaluation. We conclude by discussing the implications of the proposed framework.