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Networks are increasingly recognised as being important to successful marketing amongst small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). The purpose of this study is to investigate the structure and content of network relations amongst SME clusters, and explore the link to marketing performance.

Following a review of the literature on SME networks and marketing performance, case study analysis is performed on four SME clusters in the Greek agrifood sector.

Analysis finds that the configuration of horizontal relationships between producer SMEs has little bearing on marketing performance, unless also accompanied by strong vertical connections between key members of the SME cluster and other actors in the supply chain. The disposition of these key members towards information‐seeking and contact building outside their SME clusters is also identified as important.

To improve marketing performance, leaders in SME clusters should focus on building strong vertical relationships in the supply chain, and encourage knowledge gathering from external market contacts.

Unlike many studies of SMEs, networks and marketing performance, this research investigates the networking phenomenon at the level of whole SME clusters, rather than at the level of individual SME owner‐managers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate interorganizational knowledge exchange from the perspective of the individual manager/professional. The paper aims to study the kinds of relationships managers/professionals in SMEs are involved in and the way in which they construct boundaries within and around these interorganizational relationships enabling and hindering knowledge acquisition.

The paper is based on 31 interviews with managers and professionals in seven SMEs. Interviews focused on the interorganizational relationships they viewed as important sources of knowledge for themselves and their organizations.

The study shows that managers/professionals gain vital knowledge from far more interorganizational relationships than those formally designed for knowledge acquisition. The most important sources of knowledge were relationships with suppliers and customers. The study also identifies five boundary dimensions – interests, interpretive frameworks, trust, private/organizational and priority – which respondents use in constructing boundaries within and around the relationships. These boundary dimensions represent important conditions for knowledge acquisition through the relationship.

The five boundary dimensions are generated based on a sample of SMEs in Sweden. They must thus be regarded as provisional and need to be validated in further research including larger organizations in different cultural contexts. Future studies should also focus on the dynamics of the boundaries and their interrelations as relationships evolve.

This paper adds to research on interorganizational knowledge acquisition by taking an individual level perspective and identifying boundary dimensions through which the relationships and their knowledge flows are shaped.

The purpose of this paper is to address two questions: how do business and political (i.e. party politics and state) networks relate? What are the consequences of the relations between these two networks for the behaviour of the actors involved?

The research design consists of the historical approach based on relevant literature sources of the past, a relatively long period – from 1968, the beginning of the era of market socialism, until the first decade of the twenty-first century, by which time the market economy had been established for more than 20 years. The authors analyse the behaviour of economic and non-economic actors in Hungary based on cases and historical data, applying the IMP network approach.

Research findings demonstrate the long-term influence of the relation between business and bureaucratic networks on managerial and organizational network behaviour. The old and new pictures of the economic system are different, but the background to the pictures and the movement in the two pictures are quite similar.

The historical illustrations and cases the authors have presented cannot be too widely generalized: the characteristics of the Hungarian mode of transition from market socialism to market economy impose important limitations on the generalizability of the findings.

The study offers lessons to policy makers: policy decisions can have long term, unanticipated impacts on non-target areas as well.

The results confirm that the informal networks of socialism can replicate themselves and network structures can be repurposed in the system after the transition as well.

One contribution of the paper is related to the second network paradox: the cases illustrate non-business relationships with non-economic factors, particularly relations with bureaucracy. The other contribution is the description of how the transition from socialism to capitalism affected the networks that firms were embedded in before and after the transition.

The purpose of this paper is to explore two hospital departments, one of which is laterally dependent on the other to function, but which are subject to distinct vertical managerial controls. This complexity in vertical–lateral relations generates tension amongst the hospital’s senior managers and a perception of coordination difficulties. However, this paper shows how the interplay between managerial and non-managerial controls, plus important employee “work”, moderates tension and facilitates day-to-day lateral coordination at the patient-facing level.

This is a case-study, relying mostly on the findings of semi-structured interviews. Theoretically, the paper draws from previous insights on inter-organisational relations (but informing the focus on intra-organisational coordination) and an “institutional work” perspective.

Consistent with much extant literature, this paper reveals how non-managerial controls help to moderate tensions that could emerge from the coercive use of managerial controls. However, the authors also show a maintained influence and flexibility in the managerial controls at patient-facing levels, as new circumstances unfold.

The findings of this paper could generalise neither all laterally dependent spaces in hospitals nor patterns across different hospitals. The authors recommend future research into the dynamics and interaction of managerial and non-managerial controls in other complex settings, plus focus on the purposeful work of influential agents.

The paper has two primary contributions: extending our knowledge of the interplay between managerial and non-managerial controls inside complex organisations, where non-managerial controls reinforce rather than displace managerial controls, and highlighting that it is seldom just controls per se which “matter”, but also agents’ purposeful actions that facilitate coordination in complex organisations.

During the last two decades, the Western automobile industry has undergone significant changes. These changes have affected not only the internal organization of firms, but also their vertical limits and relationships with suppliers. This paper proposes an analytical model based on the concept of relational intensity, which allows us to characterize and analyze the current relationships maintained between automakers and direct suppliers, using the Japanese model as a frame of reference. The proposed model is applied to the case of the Spanish automobile industry. The automobile assemblers located in Spain maintain relationships of varying intensity with different groups of suppliers. There are four variables that explain this relational intensity: the technical complexity of the part/component, the human capital and locational specificity, and the market power of the supplier.

The purpose of the study is to investigate what values are now important to young American and Chinese managers, since they profile the direction in which their country is headed. It aims to explore if the ethical values of young executives in different countries are converging to a common global business culture. It also aims to argue that the individualism‐collectivism value dimension by itself does not capture the differences between the Chinese and American sample members. The vertical‐horizontal dimension, in contrast, seems to better delineate the value orientations among young executives in the two countries.

In this two‐phase study, both attitudinal and scenario‐based measurements are applied to assess the strength of work value orientations among similar subjects in China and the USA.

In study 1, Chinese respondents score significantly higher on a hierarchical‐vertical dimension than do the Americans, although the two groups do not differ significantly on the collectivism‐individualism dimension. In study 2, which entails resolving an ethical dilemma, the American subjects apply Egalitarianism as their most frequent expressed value, reflecting their horizontal perspective. The Chinese subjects, in contrast, rely strongly on a traditional vertical value system to resolve the ethical dilemma. Although both American and Chinese negotiators show a collectivist as well as an individualist orientation, their focuses are fundamentally different.

The well‐established collectivism/individualism cultural dimension has been heavily used in cross‐cultural studies, sometimes without much discretion. This study was undertaken as a preliminary attempt to outline the cultural patterns observed among young managers in America and China. The paper argues that cross‐cultural differences underlying ethical conflicts should not be reduced to the single value dimension of individualism/collectivism.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the link between national business system (NBS) and innovation decisions at the firm level by offering sequentially ordered sense-making mechanisms that enable the formation of firm-specific knowledge repositories and knowledge-processing capabilities.

This study engages in an extensive scale development effort to collect representative data about the NBS in the Pakistani setting, complemented by relevant validity and reliability tests. The overall theoretical model was tested on 214 firms by means of a structural equation modeling approach, using partial least-squares algorithms.

The results statistically supported the role of firm-level knowledge repositories (intellectual capital) and knowledge exploration and exploitation capabilities (absorptive capacity) as sequential mediators in the association of NBS and firm-level innovation. Besides, bridging networks of lateral ties among Pakistani businesses are found to be more effective than bonding networks of vertical ties in encouraging radical innovations.

This study significantly extends the literature about the NBS approach. It provides specific sense-making mechanisms (i.e. priming, triggering and editing) about how abstract institutional templates constituted at the business system level are translated into firm-level actionable sets by the help of intangible resource repositories and processes that guide knowledge exploration and exploitation.

This paper aims to identify dependences between recommending an employer by employees and the level of their contentment; indicate the determinants of the level of employees’ contentment; and define the hierarchical order of identified determinants of the level of employees’ contentment.

To prepare the theoretical part, the method of cognitive-critical analysis of worldwide subject literature from the field of marketing, personal marketing, management and human resources management was used, whereas to prepare the empirical part, the following research methods were used: a questionnaire (to gather primary data) and the method of statistical analysis in the form of correspondence analysis, including analysis the total value of χ² (to analyse the primary data gathered and for statistical deduction).

The statistical analysis of results of primary research allowed to identify the internal system of dependence between recommending an employer and employees’ contentment. Its determinants were defined and ordered according to the significance of given dependence. The strongest determinants of employees’ contentment were their satisfaction and relation variables, especially the way of treating subordinates by superiors. Majority of 18 analysed dependences were also statistically significant (apart from 7 of them), although they were characterised by a relatively weaker strength. The knowledge about this is very important for business-to-business (B2B) enterprises. Thanks it the employers can activate employees as prosumers co-building employer’s image.

The originality of the paper results from the applied approach. According to it, employees play a role of prosumers through taking part in creating the image of a B2B company as an employer. So far, the prosumption was associated only with final purchasers and not with employees. Additionally, this approach counts the contentment context of recommending B2B enterprise as the employer.

One thing that is very important with respect to Marxism in social research such as ethnography is the understanding adopted there of what kind of theory Marxist theory is and isn't and what consequences this has for its key concepts, their status, and what they represent philosophically as well as practically (i.e., in praxis). One important concept is the concept of social class. The Marxist concept of social class is very different to the class conceptions held in other research traditions. This isn't always fully appreciated by all critics of Marxist analysis in the social sciences.

Competitive intelligence (CI) includes all the information and knowledge in a business. It enables the creation, perpetuation and transmission of knowledge coming from markets and corporate stakeholders. Therefore, it seems appropriate to consider the following question: what are the levers of a CI process on knowledge management in a coopetitive context? The paper aims to discuss this issue.

To answer this question, the authors conducted an empirical study with a sample of 153 high-tech firms in Europe.

The results identify four business groups according to levels of monitoring and cooperation between firms, and three types of supervision in business networks.

This paper brings together the concepts of knowledge management and CI within firms that have adopted a coopetitive behaviour.