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This study aims to examine relational norms in cross-cultural business settings. Cross-cultural business partners may differ in their normative orientations toward relational exchange. Owing to the high extent of international trade, there is a need for developing a more nuanced understanding of cross-cultural relational exchange.

The repertory grid method was used to elicit the personal constructs characterizing the perceptions of business-to-business (B2B) relational exchange for 22 Russian and Finnish managers. These items were further categorized into categories of relational elements drawn from relational exchange literature using a content analysis. Then, the category means of scored importance and scored evaluations of domestic and foreign business partners were tested statistically.

Relational norms of flexibility, information exchange, long-term orientation, mutuality and solidarity were equally important to both Russian and Finnish managers. The importance of a business partner’s ability seems to be culturally dependent. Sharing the same cultural background might have an adverse effect when evaluating poorly functioning business relations.

The validity of these findings is limited to this context and material. Future research should repeat cross-cultural comparisons of the relational norms with more data and other nationalities.

Firms should focus on long-term orientation and mutual targets to form well-functioning cross-cultural business relationships.

This study provides new knowledge into B2B marketing literature by revealing the role of relational norms, business partner’s ability and shared cultural background on functionality of cross-cultural business relations. It also demonstrates the use of the repertory grid method in studying perceptions of relational norms.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how Chinese and Finnish managers in cross-cultural supply-chain relationships evaluate their business partners’ trustworthiness and distrustworthiness.

Representatives of two Finnish companies and their Chinese and Finnish suppliers were interviewed to collect qualitative data from 23 managers.

The Chinese managers emphasized relationship-specific, personalized trustworthiness. They highlighted personalized communication and benevolence, which manifested in respect and reciprocity, rooted in the Chinese notion of “guanxi” as personal ties. In contrast, the Finnish managers’ view of trustworthiness was more associated with depersonalized organizational attributes. They emphasized the dimension of integrity, especially promise-keeping. In addition, tentative signs of trust ambivalence, as a balance between trust- and distrust-related factors, were identified for both the Chinese and the Finns.

Due to the exploratory nature of this study the validity of the findings is limited to these data and context. Future studies could explore other national contexts as well as the effects of industry, market position, and position in the supply chain.

The findings of this study bring a valuable understanding of the potential pitfalls and unique challenges in cross-border inter-firm transactions. These can enhance inter-firm trust building in a cross-cultural context.

This study enriches the view of trust as a holistic process of simultaneous evaluation of both trustworthiness and distrustworthiness. In this process, trust ambivalence could serve as the intermediate construct between trust and distrust. These two contrary yet complementary opposites constitute a duality to be managed from the perspective of yin-yang balancing.

The purpose of this paper is to unite the fragmented discussion concerning organizational-level capability in terms of purchasing and supply chain management. The capability drivers are identified from the literature and then validated by purchasing professionals. The impacts of the identified capability drivers on supply management capability are empirically examined. To increase a firm’s supply management capability, it is essential to connect purchasing and supply chain management to the firm’s strategy, as well as to establish robust policies and procedures for the activities of supply function, and to promote supplier orientation and the value of supplier networks to the business.

Data and methodological triangulation are utilized in the form of focus group sessions and a large scale survey. A regression analysis of the data from 165 Finnish firms is performed to examine the influence of the drivers.

The drivers of supply management capability proposed in this study and ranked by the focus group were the strategic status of procurement, supplier orientation, and the formalization of organizational responsibilities and roles in the purchasing function. An examination of these components and their relation to capability by means of a regression analysis showed that they have positive effects and high explanatory power on supply management capability.

The paper summarizes capability studies in the field of purchasing and supply chain management from the last two decades and also fulfils the need for empirical studies concerning the concept of supply management capability. Moreover, it contributes to the theory development by confirming that supply management capability really is a strategic asset of a firm.

The purpose of this study is to build a generic model for relational development of a value proposition for a service concept. The study seeks to answer two questions: First, what kind of process is practical for joint development of a service concept in customer–service provider collaboration? Second, what are the functional principles for such collaboration?

A participative, design science approach was used to develop the model for a joint-development process. Researchers developed and analyzed joint activities between a provider of industrial maintenance service solutions and its customer during the process of co-developing a service concept for factory maintenance.

The study suggests that a co-development process has to integrate service blueprinting, a stage-gate philosophy, dialogical interaction principles and elements of joint learning to meet the requirement for both efficiency and relationality.

The study develops a generic model for collaborative development of value propositions that integrates the aforementioned elements of separate streams of research. Applying the developed model to different contexts would further verify and enhance it.

The model can be applied to the development of a value proposition in different collaborative development situations to enhance interplay between efficiency and relationality.

The study illustrates a generic model for joint service concept development and proposes a solution balancing contradictory requirements in such a collaboration.

Purpose – The purpose is to analyse the initial stages of co-operation between a Finnish community intranet-developing project and a ‘telecottage’ enterprise in a South-eastern Hungarian village community.

Findings – Both the Hungarian telecottage and the Finnish North Karelian intranet initiatives have achieved much publicity in and outside their countries; their success stories and experiences have also spread with the agency of researchers, by their academic publications and the lines of their personal and professional, often international networks. The case in focus is also evidence for more such informal ideas/innovation–transfer processes, supported by information and communication technologies (ICTs).

Methodology – The author, a Hungarian researcher working in Finland, has been an increasingly involved participant and observer of the evolving joint project, hence is the more subjective voice, and the action research-approach is employed.

Originality/value of chapter – This chapter presents an example of action research in the fast-developing ICT arena which clearly complements other research approaches in the field.