Paper info

Firms' ability to manage in business networks: a review of concepts

Ian Wilkinson , Thomas Ritter and Wesley Johnston

The paper was published at the 18th IMP-conference in Perth, Australia in 2002.

Several concepts have been suggested in the past to describe an actor's ability tomanage in business relationships and industrial networks. These concepts pose twoquestions. Firstly, networks are loosely coupled systems and thus, the question arises asto which extent are industrial networks manageable? Secondly, these contributions varyin their level of analysis and thus, can results from different studies be compared? Thispaper addresses these two questions by reviewing the discussion on the management ofnetworks and the contributions to managerial abilities in networks. The results of thereviews lead to a set of propositions describing the state of the art in this field ofresearch.