Prelims

Half Title Page

NO BUSINESS IS AN ISLAND: MAKING SENSE OF THE INTERACTIVE BUSINESS WORLD

Title Page

NO BUSINESS IS AN ISLAND: MAKING SENSE OF THE INTERACTIVE BUSINESS WORLD

EDITED BY

HÅKAN HÅKANSSON

BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway

IVAN SNEHOTA

Università dela Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Switzerland

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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First edition 2017

Copyright © 2017 Emerald Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78714-550-4 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78714-549-8 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78714-971-7 (Epub)

List of Contributors

Preface

Half a dozen junior researchers from different countries, with an interest in business-to-business markets, met in Uppsala in 1976 to discuss an international research project on International Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) of industrial goods. The meeting and the project that followed became the starting point and first phase in the development of a research tradition that has now gone on for some 40 years. This development has seen the involvement of more than 1,000 researchers from all continents, resulted in more than 200 PhD dissertations, dozens of books, hundreds of academic articles and 3,000 papers, presented at more than 30 annual international conferences (the last of which took place in Poznan in 2016 when this was written).

The IMP research tradition generally became credited for pioneering the concepts of business relationships, business networks and interaction, and was recognised as highly influential, not only in the field of research on marketing and purchasing in business markets (e.g. Vargo & Lusch, 2008), but also in research on innovation and economic policy. Over the past two decades, several attempts have been made to summarise and relate different research fields in the IMP research tradition to each other and to position the IMP tradition in the broader field of management research (Ford & Håkansson, 2006a, 2006b; Håkansson, Ford, Gadde, Snehota, & Waluszewski, 2009; Håkansson, Harrison, & Waluszewski, 2004; Håkansson & Snehota, 2000; Wilkinson, 2008). A weakness of these attempts to sum up the development of the IMP research is that they have been based on the initiatives of a few researchers and consequently have fallen short of providing a more comprehensive and collective overview of the various achievements in the field and the implications for management research and practice.

Given the past record, richness and variety of the IMP research, we felt it was now time to bring together and systematically relate various development paths in the IMP research and to integrate the different research fields into more solid blocks. The aim of this endeavour is to advance the conceptual development of the findings for further research and practice and, in particular, to articulate its implications. This task involved mobilising a broader group of researchers that are, or have been, related in different ways to the IMP research and have influenced the directions in which the IMP research has developed and who are also likely to affect its future development. Summarising and elaborating on 40 years of IMP research, discussing its achievements and outlining the implications required an organising process. The aim has been to create a collective output from a large number of influential researchers in the IMP community who are jointly producing some significant publications.

The overall ambition, shared with all authors, has been to:

• –

  summarise important empirical findings and conceptual developments within the IMP research tradition;

• –

  integrate the different streams of research in the IMP into more solid blocks;

• –

  articulate the implications of the IMP research for other research fields and the practice of management and economic policy; and

• –

  elaborate a base for the future development of the IMP research tradition.

The process that has led to producing this volume started in 2013, and the organisation was accomplished in four steps:

• The first step was the constitution of an ‘advisory board’ that would be involved in developing the basic structure of the process, which came to consist of three thematic workshops and one conclusive symposium.

• The second step was organising three workshops in 2015 at which researchers presented original research papers on three topics, namely (a) managerial, (b) policy and (c) research implications of the IMP research findings.

• The third was arranging a symposium in May 2016 in Uppsala, where the three themes were integrated, and the first outline of the different chapters in the present volume was discussed.

• The fourth step was publishing articles in academic outlets and then publishing the present volume.