Paper info

Mapping interaction and interdependence within the B2B marketing literature over time

Debbie Harrison and Kristin B. Munksgaard

The paper was published at the 34th IMP-conference in Marseille, France in 2018.

In a world in which many if not all companies have relationships and have to handle interdependencies, it is timely to conduct a systematic literature review of the two central ideas in IMP, interaction and interdependence. The purpose of the paper proposed here is to conduct a systematic literature review of these two concepts and to map how they have been utilised within the IMP and broader B2B marketing literature over time. This will facilitate assessing the impact of the two concepts, both with IMP and the wider B2B literature and thus providing a ground for discussing IMP’s uniqueness and place in the B2B community in a business world in which all companies have relationships. It is relevant to discuss as it is a reflection of the conceptualisation or formalisation of IMP ideas and whether and how these are applied in any systematic way. Moreover, it might aid in making clearer what IMP stands for to the (perhaps confused) outsider. The literature review will follow the methodology for developing a protocol and conducting a review outlined by Tranfield, Denyer and Smart (2003). That is, we will perform a systematic literature review as a three-stage process; (i) planning the review, (ii) conducting a review, and (iii) reporting and dissemination. Our analysis of the resulting EndNote library will be underpinned by the Leximancer tool.