Paper info

Elaborating Space in IMP Research

Jan-Ake Tornroos, Aino Halinen and Chris Medlin

The paper was published at the 28th IMP-conference in Rome, Italy in 2012.

The IMP notions of business markets see relational interaction processes being at the heart of business exchange, so leading to the concepts of business relationship and network. The constitution of processes, consisting of events and activities, relies on difference in space and time. While time has been discussed, the concept of space has thus far remained unexplored.In this paper the focus is on the spatial dimension of networks and networking. Business networks exist and are changing in space. Markets and resources, which business networks join, are distributed through space. Drawing on corporate geography and existing notions of business network theory we offer a new conceptualization of space in business networks. An examination and discussion of how the space concept is applied within the IMP research allows development of proposals to further our understanding of business networks as changing entities.