Paper info

Government-to-government projects in an institutionally embedded environment

I. Ojansivu, E. Mooi and Chris Medlin

The paper was published at the 35th IMP-conference in Paris, France in 2019.

Government-to-government exchanges have a significant economic and social impact yet present unique theoretical challenges. Despite this, these exchanges have received very limited attention in the literature. We seek to add to the small body of literature through a multidisciplinary inquiry based on theory drawn from institutional theory, work on organizational boundaries and business-to-business marketing. Through a qualitative study of a three year Euro 7.5 million project between a government donor (buyer) and an university research centre (seller), we find that the boundaries between the project buyer and the seller are constantly converging and that multiple stakeholders conduct boundary work to break or strengthen the demarcations and so drive their own agenda. Our research contributes to the industrial network approach by opening the ‘black-box’ of government-to-government exchanges and by illustrating the role of boundary work in actively managing business networks.