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Despite the fact that commercial sponsorship nowadays is a common phenomenon with salient effects on different aspects of developed societies at large (e.g. sports, the arts, the public sector, the media), academic research interest in this closely marketing‐related field seems to be rather low. Although there have been significant changes in marketing thinking during the 1990s, current research on sponsorship seems to be “stuck” in the more traditional, marketing‐mix management – and mass communicative effects‐based discourse. This paper aims at presenting a theoretical overview of how current sponsorship research could be developed further by applying the basic ideas and concepts provided by the interaction/network approach to the study of sponsorship‐related phenomena. Adopting an interaction/network perspective means that, instead of measuring the mass‐communicative effects on various audiences, the focus is on understanding the development of sponsorship relationships and networks, as well as on interpersonal communication processes going on between the sponsorship parties.

The purpose of the chapter is to elaborate the theory of academic capitalism by focusing on rarely examined forerunners of academic capitalism: namely, business schools.

A research-based essay.

The findings emphasize that there are different forms of academic capitalism. Our example from Dubai context shows how more extreme form of academic capitalism, which we label Acamanic Capitalism, developed as a result of free educational markets.

The chapter provides scholarly value through novel conceptualization. The phenomenon of acamanic capitalism should also be acknowledged in academia and in critical management education.

Owing to the strong position of traditional marketing communications (especially advertising) research and consumer marketing related theories in the general field of marketing, the prevailing concepts of communication can be labeled as “mass communicative” in current marketing discourse as a whole. However, along with the rise of various “relational approaches” in marketing, the focus of marketing research seems to shift from products and firms as a central unit of analysis to people, organizations and the social processes that bind actors together in ongoing relationships. In these interactive relationship/network contexts, the nature of communication is hardly mass communicative. This article aims at presenting a theoretical framework on the role of communication in business relationships and networks. The interaction/network approach to marketing means moving from the current perspective of marketing’s mass‐communicative effects and consequent communicative behaviors of organizations to the “lower level” of interpersonal communication processes occurring within business relationships and networks.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework for identifying the primary tensions that business school dean’s encounter when moving between different university contexts.

The paper is part of a larger research project on the development of business schools. This conceptual paper builds on the studies and personal experiences of business schools and their management in a number of different countries, primarily in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East.

The present study argues that as a response to the increasing corporatization of higher education, the university sector has fragmented into at least three identifiable contexts: the traditional research university, the academic capitalist university, and the corporate university. The authors conclude that the match between a dean’s worldview and the university context ultimately determines the appropriateness, survival, and success of deanship.

The paper provides practical suggestions for managing business schools. Given that “good” leadership is always context dependent, no single deanship would fit for all business schools. As an outcome, both deans and the selection committees making decisions regarding their recruitment should be sensitive to their worldviews originating from the university contexts in which they previously worked.

Emphasizing a contextual approach to business school leadership, this paper proposes a new typology of deanship situations.

The aim of this paper is to identify the effects of business cycles on industrial business‐to‐business relationships within extremely volatile industries.

The paper is an in‐depth case study on Outotec plc, a leading provider of technologies for the mining and metal industries.

The study identifies the changes in a business relationship during a business cycle as the dominance between the parties and the cooperative and the competitive nature of the relationship alternate.

The study identifies ways to smooth the effects of business cycles in extremely volatile industries from the viewpoint of a project‐based technology provider.

While a significant amount of macroeconomic research on cycles and a few studies on industry‐specific business cycles can be found, this study is a rare example of company‐specific research on surviving business cycles.

Many types of commercial professional services are commonly sold as projects. Therefore this article draws on the project marketing literature to elucidate the international marketing of professional service projects. After an initial literature review, the project marketing milieu concept’s a priori territorial definition is critically examined on the basis of cases concerning the internationalization of Nordic architectural firms. It is hypothesized that territoriality plays the biggest role in situations where a firm is moving from one national milieu with well‐established norms, rules, and representations to another national milieu with similarly well‐developed norms, rules, and representations, yet that there also exist global milieux. Managerial implications concerning professional service firms’ preparation for entering a foreign milieu as well as subsidiary or office establishment abroad are provided.

The purpose of this paper is to “open up” the concept of customer satisfaction in industrial markets through arguing for a broader, contextually sensitive perspective to the phenomenon in its real‐life settings. The conceptual argumentation put forward in this paper is based on an action‐oriented research project on customer satisfaction in industrial markets conducted in two globally operating case organizations, the first one in paper machine manufacturing and the second one in production of high quality steel for industry. On the basis of the three steps highlighted in this paper – the inner context of a business relationship, the connected network of the customer‐supplier relationship, and the outer context of the connected network – it is argued that one can gain a more complete understanding of the context within which customer satisfaction actually emerges in industrial markets. The main function of the three steps proposed in this paper is to structure the inherent complexity and multiple facets of different contexts affecting customer satisfaction as a managerial phenomenon.

The purpose of this research is to increase understanding of post-project business relationships in service-intensive projects, a topic unexplored to date. This research contributes to the project marketing research focusing on post-project interaction, by building a conceptual research framework capable of illustrating the path from the initiation of a relationship through the project’s afterlife.

A comparative case study is used across four different service-intensive project contexts to highlight the conceptual research framework, derived from the IMP-related interaction research, in practice.

According to the research findings, there are at least four potential post-project business relationships associated with service-intensive projects. Furthermore, the findings indicate that these relationships embody certain antecedent and process characteristics, enabling us to compile four distinct development paths.

The four cases of the empirical research were chosen on theoretical grounds to highlight the conceptual research framework in practice, and thus the purpose was mainly descriptive. The findings should be generalized only with caution, as more empirical research is needed in this emerging project context.

For managers, the findings provide practical guidance to deal with different post-project relationships. They will help managers to initiate, maintain and develop post-project relationships and to avoid a mismatch between relationship antecedent, processes and outcomes.

Post-project buyer – seller interaction has been studied by the project marketing research stream, but mainly from the perspective of social exchange and sleeping relationships. With the advent of service-intensive projects, however, a whole new breed of post-project business relationships is unfolding and demanding research attention. This research is a step toward understanding the different post-project business relationships associated with service-intensive projects.

There has lately been increasing discussion revolving around the emerging concepts of organizational competencies, business processes and industrial networks among both academic researchers and practitioners in various fields of management. In our opinion, there should be a systematic aim to bring together the new view of interorganizational business reality offered by the network approach and some basic ideas related to the concepts of organizational competencies and business processes. This could be one way to reach a more complete understanding of the occurrence of competence-based business processes within the relevant network context. On the other hand, this kind of synthesis might prove useful in making the network approach more practically oriented and applicable in real-life organizations. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce an integrative approach to the study of competence-based business processes primarily through the application of concepts and ideas of the network approach. First, key ideas and concepts related to the above-mentioned three theoretical perspectives are discussed and elaborated. Second, an integrative framework is proposed through which an empirical case involving the long-term development of competence-based business processes within industrial networks can be analyzed. Third, the framework is applied empirically in a longitudinal case study of Valmet Inc., a Finnish manufacturer which developed during the post-war period from a producer of weapons to the world's leading producer of paper machines. Fourth, theoretical and managerial implications are put forward on the basis of the authors' understanding gained during the research process.

Interorganisational buyer‐seller relationships have been primarily studied from the perspective of relationship development and the benefits accrued from relationships. There is a lack of research concerning problems with relationships and relationship dissolution. The dissolution of a business relationship can be either desirable, freeing badly deployed resources, as indicated by the customer portfolio approach, or harmful, involving costly legal disputes and the loss of company reputation. By employing a theory‐driven case study approach we examine the exit strategies available for the disengager in dissolving interorganisational buyer‐seller relationships. We show that the quality of dissolution is affected by the disengager’s choice of exit strategy. Managerial suggestions are provided for achieving “beautiful exits”, i.e. such communication strategies which minimise damages of the dissolution to the disengager, the other party, and the connected business network.