Call for Papers
Industrial Marketing Management

 

Special issue on Interplay between Cognition, Action and Outcomes in Business Markets

Deadline: May 1st, 2013

During the last few decades, there has been growing interest in business-to-business studies on cognition and sense-making (IMM Special Issue, Sense-Making and Management in Business Networks, Vol. 39, No. 3). At first, the interest was mainly devoted to examining the relationship between individual cognition and action; later, it became more complex, having evolved towards better understanding how collective cognition emerges in interaction in business networks and what consequences it generates. During this research process, concepts and findings from other disciplines have been adopted and applied to business studies, whilst simultaneously new concepts were developed within this specific area. Among the latter, “network pictures” or individual subjective interpretations of managers’ business context, is one of the most debated and used.

The various research contributions to this area have thus led to a widening of scope in the field. However, this has also resulted in a call for improved clarity and for a stronger integration of parallel research developments from related disciplines. Often concepts from other fields have been applied to the study of business markets, but the integration with existing models of business-to-business marketing has arguably not yet been achieved.

Contributions from other disciplines, such as social and organizational psychology, sociology, business practice studies and strategic management, as well as the application of new methods in the field, are particularly welcome in order to foster a cross-fertilization and multi-disciplinary approach to understanding business-to-business marketing. We welcome both conceptual and empirical papers.

Some, but not exclusive, research questions are the following:

• What is the interplay between cognition, managerial action and outcomes within organizations, business relationships and business networks?
• How is this interplay, in business practice, related to formal economic theories, and to market analyses and economic analyses?
• How can the concept of boundary objects help to better understand the way business actors coordinate their actions in interaction in networks?
• How does this interplay affect learning and strategic change in organizations?
• How can research based on the ‘network pictures’ concept be developed to better understand collective decision-making and interaction in business markets?
• How can Ford et al. (2003)’s model on the interplay between network pictures, networking activities and network outcomes be used and further developed (Ford, D., Gadde, L. E., Håkansson, H., & Snehota, I., 2003, Managing business relationships. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons)?
• What methods can serve the purpose of empirically addressing the relationship between cognition, action and outcomes?
• How is this relationship affected by ICT developments?

Submissions of papers

Papers submitted must not have been published, accepted for publication, or presently be under consideration for publication with any other journal. Guidelines for submissions can be found in “Notes for Contributors” in recent issues of Industrial Marketing Management. Suitable articles will be subjected to a double-blind review. Hence authors should not identify themselves in the body of the paper. Papers should be submitted as MS Word attachment to the Special Issue editors with a copy to the IMM editor: plaplaca@journalimm.com.

Submission deadline

May 1st, 2013

Special Issue Editors

Lars-Gunnar Mattsson
Stockholm School of Economics
lars-gunnar.mattsson@hhs.se

Daniela Corsaro
Università della Svizzera italiana; Università Cattolica di Milano
daniela.corsaro@usi.ch; daniela.corsaro@unicatt.it

Carla Ramos
Manchester Business School
carla.ramos@mbs.ac.uk

 

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