Purpose: This paper aims to conceptualize corporate reference management as a strategic signaling activity in business networks. While research has extensively outlined how firms develop and maintain social capital through business-to-business (B2B) relationships, less is known about how they...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a scale for inter-firm market orientation (IMO) based on an original conceptualization by Elg (2008). Building on the MARKOR scale, the IMO scale is introduced to better understand the market orientation efforts that occur within...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to gain a deeper understanding of the attributes of effective complaint management in business‐to‐business relationships, and to reveal the underlying benefits that buying organizations are looking for when complaining. Design/methodology/approach –...

Purpose – There is conflicting evidence of the extent to which business relationships in the UK construction industry are based on trust between closely collaborating parties or alternatively are more adversarial in nature, based on dependence between the parties. This study seeks to provide...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to identify how companies mobilize other companies in their surrounding network to work within the plans they develop. Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual model is developed and its applicability is illustrated by a case study involving a...

Purpose – This paper seeks to give empirical examples of the processes whereby networks learn to collaborate. Specifically, the authors aim to examine efforts to learn to collaborate in response to the challenge of climate change. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses case study...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate how context influences the quality of business relationships. This theoretical question is studied from the point of view of trust, one of the important components of business relationship quality. The authors study how trust is...