Now showing 1 - 10 of 44
  • Publication
    Leaning in or falling over? Epistemological liminality and the knowledges that make a market
    (Taylor and Francis, 2022-05-16) ;
    This article describes the experiences of two market studies scholars who became involved in an Applied Research Centre aimed at developing a societally valuable market in digital health–an experience that ended in failure. We introduce the concept of epistemological liminality as a theoretical tool to problematise our own positionality as ‘market experts’ in this failed academic-industry-government collaboration around a concerned market. Liminality involved entering a transitional space–time in which our academic knowledge as market studies scholars was suspended, but where we failed to successfully move into a new epistemic space of ‘applied market studies’. This state of suspension–and frustration–is a cautionary tale for the difficulties of linking different (and often contradictory) epistemic communities that meet in applied research. We stop short of providing a moral to this market (non)performance tale, but we do highlight the need for openness and debate on the knowledges that come together to make a market in such collaborations.
      57Scopus© Citations 2
  • Publication
    Adding Value to International Business Education: An Irish-American Road Map to Service Learning
    This article summarises the experience of two undergraduate schools of business, one in Ireland and one in the United States, in developing an international service learning programme for study-abroad students. Working from an already existing partnership, the schools established an academically-based programme with a support structure for students administered by both institutions. Practical considerations required the Irish partner institution establish its own service learning programme and that the United States partner institution assist in that through a visiting professorship. In the process of this collaborative effort the actors were reminded of the importance of academic and strategic compatibility; senior administrative support; making room for cultural differences; and listening to the student voice. This case is presented as an example of the lessons learned along the road of achieving the combined benefits of study abroad and service learning.
      364
  • Publication
    Interpersonal influence strategies in complex B2B sales and the socio-cognitive construction of relationship value
    (Elsevier, 2015-08) ;
    The investigation of how exactly salespeople create value at the individual level of interaction is still incomplete. While there have been lively debates on value creation and co-creation processes at the organizational level in the business marketing literature, researchers have paid much less attention to the fact that such processes almost always start at the interpersonal level of buyer-seller interactions. Through utilizing a symbolic interactionist perspective and the ethnographic research method of shadowing, the present study moves research insights into value creation in sales forward by depicting the detailed activities and tactics that influence customers' value perceptions during the sales encounter. We complement the sales influence literature with three additional tactics: disrupt, reassure and dedicate. We also expand the framework of value creation in sales interactions by identifying three value strategies that change, strengthen or expand customer value perceptions through different socio-cognitive mechanisms.
    Scopus© Citations 55  1104
  • Publication
    Managing in Conflict: How Actors Distribute Conflict in an Industrial Network
    IMP researchers have examined conflict as a threat to established business relationships and commercial exchanges, drawing on theories and concepts developed in organization studies. We examine cases of conflict in relationships from the oil and gas industry's service sector, focusing on conflicts of interest and resources, and conflict as experienced by actors. Through a comparative case study design, we propose an explanation of how actors manage conflict and manage in conflict given that they tend to value and maintain relationships beyond episodes of exchange. We consider conflicts in relationships from a network perspective, showing that actors experienced these while adapting to changes in their business setting, modifying their roles in that network. By identifying conflict with the organizing forms of relationship and network, we show how actors formulate conflict through pursuing and combining a number of strategies, distributing the conflict across an enlarged network.
    Scopus© Citations 29  476
  • Publication
    Making incremental innovation tradable in industrial service settings
    (Elsevier, 2016-07) ;
    In many knowledge-intensive business-to-business settings the locus of interaction has shifted from stable, discrete, and articulated products and services to the exchange of somewhat nebulous capacities of problem-solving, innovation and R&D services. In these exchanges, tensions and conflicts between actors can arise in seeking clarity as to what is being exchanged while attempting to keep the interaction open for future adjustments to the scope and content of the exchange. We combine a longitudinal case study of a chemical services firm with Galison's (1999) concept of a trading zone to assess how actors offer, value and exchange incremental innovation. Focusing on the contentious nature of innovation processes, examine how incremental innovation is formatted as a tradable service and argue that trading zones complement relational processes and contractual arrangements by allowing actors to preserve their own logics and expertise pertaining to innovation.
    Scopus© Citations 14  307
  • Publication
    Buyer-Seller Interactions in Mature Industrial Markets: Blurring the Relational-Transactional Selling Dichotomy
    (Routledge (Taylor & Francis), 2011) ;
    Sales practitioners continue to come to terms with the selling conditions of mature consumer and business markets. Mature markets display signs such as cost-focused competition, similarity in the perceived functionality of offerings, and multiple suppliers vying for highly knowledgeable and powerful customers. While researchers have noted that in mature industrial markets the relationship to sales personnel can be an important differentiator for buyers, sales research has not specifically examined the consequences of market maturity on the conditions and modes of selling in these markets. In addressing this gap in research, this paper examines the effects of market maturity on the relationships between selling personnel and their customers by presenting case study research from a mature industrial market for chemistry products: the North Sea oil industry.
    Scopus© Citations 12  892
  • Publication
    The Demise of a Rising Social Enterprise for Persons With Disabilities: The Ethics and the Uncertainty of Pure Effectual Logic When Scaling Up
    How does a social enterprise pursue its ethical mandate of social impact growth while navigating the perils of the most vulnerable stage in a venture’s life—scaling up? We observe a small inclusivity social enterprise attempting to scale up rapidly to create equality for people with disabilities throughout the world. Our embedded, ethnographic study is terminated with the venture’s unfortunate demise after their dramatic effort to scale up failed. By examining scaling decision-making and conflicts around creation reasoning longitudinally, our study identifies over-use of effectual logic—a creation reasoning type considered more ethical and more appropriate for high-innovativeness contexts than causal logic—as a major factor in the venture’s failure. From this insight, we extend the parameters of effectuation theory to scaling up and dimensionalize its ethical implications. Guidance for social entrepreneurs to scale up successfully while maintaining ethical integrity is also provided.
    Scopus© Citations 1  17
  • Publication
    Grounded theory in sales research: an investigation of salespeoples' client relationships
    In this paper, grounded theory as an inductive method of theory generation in business research is presented and critically evaluated. The historical and epistemological backgrounds of the method are discussed, its research procedures are briefly outlined, and its suitability for sales research assessed. To illustrate the principles of the method, a study of the nature of business-to-business sales relationships is introduced. The results of this study show clearly that grounded theory can yield highly significant findings in areas that deal with phenomena as complex as human relationships, where the construction of theoretical frameworks cannot be achieved at the cost of conceptual density.
    Scopus© Citations 28  1241
  • Publication
    Promissories and pharmaceutical patents: agencing markets through public narratives
    (Taylor and Francis, 2015-07-25) ;
    We investigate a body of data emanating from the 2008/2009 EU Pharmaceutical Sector Inquiry, interpreting the collection of submissions to it as a concerted attempt at market innovation that becomes fraught with challenge and contest. In the pharmaceutical market, interests associated with patient concerns, government budgets, global 'Big Pharma,' and local 'small pharma' coalesce and compete with patent law, technological innovation and drug lifecycles. Our research question is: What role do market narratives play in shaping the market's socio-technical agencements? By introducing market narratives, we focus on the performative effects of temporality and iteration. Our argument is that by acting as (contested) promissories, market narratives contribute to 'agencing' a market, such that actors are engaged continually in juxtaposing and adjusting their representations of it and putting in place those socio-technical agencements that make the markets resemble those narratives. Narrating a market becomes a collective and iterative task of equipping actors to shape the markets that they desire.
    Scopus© Citations 19  344
  • Publication
    Positioning and Relating: Market Boundaries and the Slippery Identity of the Marketing Object
    (Emerald, 2010-09) ;
    We propose a novel perspective on positioning by identifying goods and services first as market objects and then as marketing objects. As part of their normal marketing activities marketers position market objects and thereby provide means for other market actors to evaluate differences and similarities across an array of goods and services. Hence, marketers help disentangle goods and services in a market space, so formatting them as market objects. At the same time, marketers tend to make references to cultural and material dimensions in the worlds of producing and consuming goods and services, thereby re-entangling these market objects in the worlds beyond the market and re-formatting them as marketing objects. Drawing on an actor-network theoretical lens, we develop our argument to show that positioning refers to many ‘others’; producers and consumers as well as those objects which the market and its calculating frame ignore. We extend our reference beyond market objects through the marketing object to those others, which necessarily are poorly-defined, and which suggest complex, contentious and rich alternatives to a market’s frames of calculation.
    Scopus© Citations 38  578