Authors: Ian Wilkinson; Louise Young
10 years ago the focus was on developing and managing relationship marketing in B2C markets, relations in services, B2B market relations, and relations within firms. Since then we have witnessed many developments in our domain of interest. Here we briefly review some of the developments that have taken place in our own work in the 90s and beyond in the area of business relations and networks – a more comprehensive review is to be found in Wilkinson 2001. In particular, we draw on developments in the complexity sciences to focus on how the network of business and non-business relations in which a firm is embedded can be viewed as a complex adaptive system (CAS) and the implications of this for theory, methodology and management.This leads us to consider the deeper underlying issue of the role of context in explaining and managing strategy and behaviour. We distinguish this from individual firm or person focused dispositional explanations that portray the context as part of the problem to be solved or task to be undertaken. We draw on developments taking place in connectivist approach to cognition and the way mind, body and local environment come together as parts of an extended collective actor model of cognition. Parallels are drawn with the way managers, the organisation and the network can be viewed as an extended actor. The concept of soft assembled strategies (SAS) is introduced in which the mind, body and local environment, or the manager, organisation and network, work together in a self organizing fashion and learn to leverage off the innate properties or affordances offered by these contextual elements. SAS are viewed as an important way of conceptualizing the task managers face in developing and implementing business strategies in CAS – or, perhaps, the way business dance parties are enabled.
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Publish Year: 2002
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