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Paper info: Sources of Business Relationship Importance in Sweden, Germany, and China

Title


Sources of Business Relationship Importance in Sweden, Germany, and China

Authors


Ian Wilkinson
University of Sydney
Australia
Ian Wilkinson ,
James Wiley
Victoria University
New Zealand
James Wiley and
Louise Young
University of Western Sydney
Australia
Louise Young

Place of Publication


The paper was published at the 19th IMP-conference in Lugano, Switzerland in 2003.

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Abstract


The topic of business relationships has received significant scholarly attention during the 1990's, and before, as a review of research in this area shows (Wilkinson 2001). A major contribution to the study of business relationships is a database established by the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group international research project (IMP2). The data in the IMP2 database comes from an omnibus survey instrument that includes questions regarding a respondent firm's exchange relationships with a specified other ?important? firm. The part of the European IMP2 database we use in this study concerns data gathered on dyadic business relationships of supplier firms in Germany and Sweden. The supplier companies in the study belong to different industries, ranging from raw materials to equipment. Interviews were conducted with marketing executives, who were asked to select one of the firm's most important customers in a specific country. The respondents were also asked to select a customer relationship they were responsible for and of which they had personal experience. Wilkinson and Young used the IMP2 questionnaire to collect equivalent data in China. Independent native bilingual Chinese speakers did translations and back translations. For details of this see Dawson et. al., (1997). The questionnaire was then administered to a sample of Chinese suppliers of international business customers. Officers from the Chinese Bureau of Statistics conducted personal interviews using the full IMP2 questionnaire. Interviews continued until the target sample size of 100 was achieved. As with the European data, the supplier companies in the study belong to different industries. Interviewees were marketing executives. The interviews followed the European protocol.The augmented IMP2 database includes several questions regarding sources of business relationships (Table 1 and Figure 1). It also includes a number of questions regarding sources of importance of business relationships (Tables 2, 3, and 4). The objective of the present paper is to do a comparative analysis of the source and degree of focal firm relationship importance in Sweden, Germany and China. The analysis is part of an on-going effort to develop a valid measure of business network connections based on the IMP2 database. Other papers working toward this end include Blankenburg-Holme, Ericksson, and Johanson (1996), and Wiley, Wilkinson, and Young (2002a, 2002b). Our focus here is on the perceived reasons for the importance of supplier-customer relations as perceived by suppliers, which relates to the general issue of value creation in business relations (e.g. Walter et al 2002).