Authors: Jens Geersbro; Laurids Hedaa
This paper addresses the temporal and contextual aspects of business networks. Building on previous IMP work on event networks and on the concept of themes, this paper suggests a new framework combining event networks and themes that can provide new insights into and understanding of business network events. While the work done on business networks has greatly increased our understanding of the interdependencies between actors and between relationships, the focus has primarily been on the dyadic interaction of firms leading to a preoccupation with structural aspects often reifying the network as a collection of relationships. This has left out the process aspect to a large degree. We need to realize that there is a duality that business networks are not only the result of interaction between firms, but that interactions between firms are also the result of business networks ?at the same time!. To be able to investigate time, timing and process aspects in this dualistic perspective, there seems to be a need for a concept that will not collapse these aspects. Therefore the paper develops a concept of theme networks and demonstrates how this concept can be applied to a practical case of relationship dissolution. The paper contrasts the findings to a discourse analytical approach previously done on the same case by one of the authors. Implications for further developments of the concepts methodology are discussed.
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Publish Year: 2003
Conference: Lugano, Switzerland (2003)