Contracts, relationships and innovation in business-to-business exchanges
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to contrast two approaches to the study of contracts in business and industrial marketing: first, as a legal document in shaping at the outset exchanges and interactions, for instance in projects; and second, as relational norms in becoming integrated into a business relationship through interactions, for instance as a resource.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on cross-case comparison of three projects, as actors develop an engineering service for optimizing the maintenance of large-scale capital equipment by analyzing real-time data from sensors and user records. Comparison is by coding interview and observational data as micro-sequences of interactions among actors.
Findings
Preparing contracts allows a project to commence and is an early form of interaction, intensifying new relationships or cutting into and recasting established ones. Relational norms augment and can supersede the early focus on the contract, thus incorporating incremental innovation and absorbing some uncertainties.
Research limitations/implications
The research approach benefits from detailed comparison and captures some variety across its three cases, but the discussion is limited to theoretical generalization.
Practical implications
The analysis and discussion highlights and focuses on when different approaches to understanding contracting are more apparent across durable business relationships. Transitions from a contractual document to a view of relational norms are subtle, vulnerable and not always made successfully.
Originality/value
This paper’s originality is in it comparison of overlapping approaches to understanding businesses’ uses of contacts in business and industrial marketing, of contract and relational norms. It develops a valuable research proposition, in the transition from a mainly contractual to a mainly relational uses of contracts, thus identifying contract as a particular business resource, to be deployed and embedded.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This paper was presented at the 28th IMP Conference in Rome, September 2012. We are very grateful to the editors and reviewers of this special issue for their detailed and constructive feedback as we have developed this paper.
Citation
Möhring, M.M. and Finch, J. (2015), "Contracts, relationships and innovation in business-to-business exchanges", Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. 30 No. 3/4, pp. 405-413. https://doi.org/10.1108/JBIM-12-2012-0249
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited