Outsourcing continues to be an important strategic tool for firms. While outsourcing can take place without major problems, some firms experience problems. Unfulfilled expectations or new opportunities can make alterations to existing sourcing solutions necessary. Such reconsiderations may be...

Market conditions may lead firms to increase offensive marketing activities aimed at attracting new customers, and/or to enhance defensive relationship building intended to retain current customers. Characteristics of the marketing environment are examined, including firms' interest in...

This article reports on an experiment in external facilitation of international project marketing activity. The case involved a large, World Bank funded project in China aimed at upgrading grain storage and handling facilities. An organization was established in Australia to bring together and...

Discount rates are widely used in the public sector to assess policy proposals where costs and benefits accrue over long time periods. Socially optimal policy choices require an appropriate choice of discount rate. This paper assesses the applicability of the two key theoretical approaches to...

Science is a social process that functions through social networks of researchers that form invisible colleges. Analysis of these social networks provides a means for examining the structure of relations among researchers. The Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group, "an informal...

Cooperative relations, within and between firms, play important roles in business. How to produce such relations, however, is less well understood. Building on work in evolutionary biology we examine the conditions under which group based incentives result in better performance than individual...

We show how different approaches to developing marketing strategies depending on the type of environment a firm faces, where environments are distinguished in terms of their systems properties not their context. Particular emphasis is given to turbulent environments in which outcomes are not a...