Authors: Peter Naudé; Sabrina Thornton; Stephan Henneberg
This researchadopts a network perspective and attempts to understand how firms‘network’ beyond their directly connected counterparts. Furthermore, it examines how they exploit their webs of direct and indirect relationships in order to embrace the potential opportunities and hindrances in the network. The dynamic capabilities and the interaction approach are the two theoretical perspectives that guide this research to understand organisational networking behaviours. Thirty-one semi-structured interviews with director-level managers fromfifteenUK manufacturing firms were conducted. We identify four types of organisational networking behaviours by the way in which firms utilise their web of relationships to achieve certain goals. These purposeful networking behaviours can be categorised into following categories: information acquisition, opportunity enabling, strong-tie-approach, and weak-tie-approach resource mobilisation. By utilising the concept of networking in the IMP literature and the strong and weak tie argument in economic sociology, this study demonstrates that together these two perspectives provide deeper understandingas to how firms operating in business-to-business markets exploit their webs of direct and indirect relationships, taking into consideration the embeddedness and interconnectedness of the network context
Journal: n.a. (n.a. – n.a.)
Web Address: n.a.
Publish Year: 2012
Conference: Rome, Italy (2012)