The Dualities of Buyer-Seller Interaction : Understanding Relationship Maintainance in the Light of Multiplexity

Buyers and sellers interact between themselves in different ways. They conclude economic transactions but often have also social exchanges; they compete on the appropriation of value generated throughout the pipeline but often also collaborate in value co-creation. Past research, in most cases, looked at such interaction modalities through an 'or / or' lens, and considered one modality as prevailing within the relationship at a given moment in time. In this study, we explore an 'and / and' logic, and look at the implications of dualities in interaction for the quality and stability of buyer-seller relationships. In doing so, we further open the mainstream view of buyer-seller interaction in business marketing to social theories on the structure of economic action and the strategy view of coopetition, and build a theoretical framework where relationship maintenance is conceived as the conciliation of diverging tensions of interaction