Industrial purchasing is a growing discipline with a broad scope of research issues. Research contributions vary greatly with respect to problem issues, the level of analysis, research methods and the application of theoretical frameworks. Literature reviews in the purchasing research field give...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to argue for an explicit foundation of market exchange on person‐to‐person relationships as an alternative to the foundation on person‐to‐goods relationship underlying the exchange model inherited from neoclassical economics and classical contract law...

This article advocates recognition of interpretive elements in business research and the need for improvement of the researcher’s interpretive skills. The scientific tradition specifically concerned with interpretation is called hermeneutics. However, interpretation exists in all types of...

Purpose – Networks are increasingly recognised as being important to successful marketing amongst small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). The purpose of this study is to investigate the structure and content of network relations amongst SME clusters, and explore the link to marketing...

Purpose – The paper aims to offer a five‐step method for discovering a customer's particular strategic needs based on a unique application of value‐chain analysis. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a five‐step approach. Step 1 explains how internal and external value...

How do managers, in their role as decision makers, design and implement systems for management of quality? Proposes that there is no one, definitive answer to this question, given various industrial environments and their operating constraints, diverse market conditions and numerous management...

Purpose – The main purpose of the paper is to examine the possible links between some selected dimensions of national culture and business‐to‐business (B2B) relationships. Design‐methodology/approach – Since this paper proposes a conceptual model, a qualitative approach is taken to...

Purpose – The aim of this study is to develop a structural model and test it in the parcel delivery services business‐to‐business market in order to identify how services quality influences relationship quality and to determine the interactions between constructs of relationship quality....

The tenets of relationship marketing are useful in understanding the success of a service provider. Based on a sample of 221 firms in Singapore that use ocean freight shipping services, examines service recovery issues related to satisfaction. It was found that service recovery methods such as...