Paper info

Is there such a thing as a 'dyadic operationalization'? Some considerations regarding quantitative research and the interaction model of business relationships

Bahar Ashnai , Pete Naude and StephanC. Henneberg

The paper was published at the 25th IMP-conference in Marseille, France in 2009.

This paper addresses the challenge of bridging two seemingly incommensurable research traditions, i.e. the IMP Group tradition related to qualitative and descriptive interaction approaches on the one hand, and the focal company perspective linked to the resource-based view of the firm with quantitative approaches and the purpose of deriving generalizeable results on the other hand. Our paper tries to find ways of cross-fertilisation between these two research areas. The specific starting point of this paper is represented by the objective of exploring the viability of dyadic analyses of business relationships within a quantitative research design. Thus, this article asks whether or not there is such a thing as a dyadic operationalization, i.e. the possibility of capturing the characteristics of the relationship partners and their (inter)dependence and contingency on each other. The main contribution of such research resides in the possibility to open up more meaningful quantitative work as part of the IMP Group tradition, as well as enriching the often limited focal company perspective of much existing neo-positivistic research on business relationships. Specifically, different ways of using a dyadic unit-of-analysis based on monadic units-of-observations are discussed.