Paper info

Analysing Business Interaction

Alexandra Waluszewski , David Ford , Håkan Håkansson , Ivan Snehota and Lars-Erik Gadde

The paper was published at the 24th IMP-conference in Uppsala, Sweden in 2008.

This paper develops a conceptualization of the nature of business interaction drawing on the empirical work of the IMP Group.  The paper suggests that business interaction can be interpreted as a confrontation process that occurs between companies and which changes and transforms aspects of the resources and activities of the involved companies and of the companies themselves. The suggested substantive nature of the interaction gives it an existence in time and space, which in turn has important consequences both for the structure and for processes within the economic landscape. Interaction will in this way become at heart of business development.