Where is the Action?

Taking a set of studies about business action as the empirical starting-point, this paper looks at the various ways in which action is represented. The overall research question can be stated as follows: how is business action reconstructed in our narratives? The texts analysed are collected from research on exchange relationships in the field of marketing. To analyse how these texts depict business action, four narrative constructions are focused: space, time, actors, and plots. The categorisation and analysis are summarised and followed by a set of concluding implications and suggestions for the use of narratives aiming to reconstruct business action in the making.Marketing; narrative; plot; marketing methodology; business action; industrial marketing research

EU:s svårföränderliga jordbrukspolitik - En studie om varför CAP är så svårföränderligt ur ett nyinstitutionalistiskt perspektiv

The European Union's long-term budget negotiations during the summer of 2005 were obstructed from being successful due to a quite fierceful debate about the future guidelines of the Common Agricultural Policy. A quarrel about money and who gets what, was the common answer as to why it took the European leaders six months to accept the budget, and quite rightfully. This essay, however, goes beneath those explanations and tries to see what other reasons there might be for such a phenomena. With a new institutionalistic approach this study seeks to see what underlying reasons for why an institution such as CAP is so resistant to change. With special attention to the new historical institutionalism and the rational choice institutionalism the study successfully shows that though the front laying reasons to the problems with the budget might have been economical, several other factors also affected the outcome of the budget negotiations. Structures, national identity and decisions taken when outlining the Common Agricultural Policy in the 1960's still affect the European union, its members and foremost of all, the Policy/institution itself

Läkemedelsdistributionen i Norden. En komparativ studie av aktörer, resurser och aktiviteter.

This paper reports on a preliminary studie of the organising of pharmaceutical goods distribution in the Nordic countries. Based on close descriptions of the four national markets, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, a comparative analysis is made. The chosen comparative dimensions are: activity structures and actor constellations; vertical and horisontal integration; service levels; and pricing system. Despite their apparent similarities the four national markets display many differences in these dimensions. Further, within each national market, there are considerable differences between how the distribution operations are described in principle and how they appear when observed in practice.pharmaceuticals; goods distribution; market re-regulation; pricing

Markets for Promoting Innovation in Health Care? A Market Practice Study of Public Procurement of Innovation (PPI)

This article critically analyzes public procurement of innovation (PPI) as an instance of using markets or market-like aspects as a means to resolve public concerns. It reports findings from a case of procuring radiation therapy equipment for a university hospital in Stockholm, Sweden. By extending a line of literature built on economic sociology as well as science and technology studies (STS), the study elaborates on public actors’ efforts in framing markets to promote innovation. The case illustrates how the participating actors constructed the notion of innovativeness to be introduced into health care as means of addressing various public concerns. It also reveals the intended—and unintended—consequences of PPI as manifested in various actors’ claims on the value of PPI realized in practice. The study suggests that it is extremely difficult to frame a market for the realization of innovation via procurement as a policy instrument because we cannot predict the ultimate impacts of devices and practices employed in such initiatives. By formulating a practice-based critique of PPI, our study invites important questions about the potentiality of such instruments for governing innovation without delimiting their consequences to the success-or-failure dichotomy as prescribed in predefined tools and strategies

Svenska europaparlamentariker vänder hemåt - En teoriprövande studie om svenska europaparlamentarikers nationella partilojalitet

Vi har valt att ägna vår uppsats åt de svenska europaparlamentarikerna. Utgångspunkten för vårt arbete är en B-uppsats från 2001 som handlar de svenska EU-parlamentarikernas inställning till transnationellt partisamarbete. Vi gör en teoriprövande studie av deras uppsats. Vi har med hjälp av litteratur på området lättare kunnat förstå de redan existerande teorier om transnationellt partisamarbete och europaparlamentet samt dess parlamentariker. Vår uppsats kärna är den enkät vi låtit våra svenska parlamentariker från den nuvarande samt den förra mandatperioden svara på. Det vi kommit fram till i denna uppsats är att den nationella partipiskan biter minst lika hårt vare sig man som europaparlamentariker är kritisk eller positiv till EU. Utifrån våra resultat ser vi inte att EU-positiva parlamentariker är mer benägna att bryta mot sin nationella partilinje än EU-kritiska. Detta strider mot den teori vi prövar. Utöver detta har vi även valt att lyfta fram ett par områden där vår enkätundersökning resulterade i intressanta svar

Revisiting the Business Relationship Concept

In this paper we contend that the central notion of &lsquo;a business relationship&rsquo; has largely been taken for granted and remains understudied within IMP research. tIn this paper we interrogate the notion of a &lsquo;dyadic exchange relationship&rsquo; between Org A and Org B. Instead, we identify a dyadic business relationship as multiple entities. The singular version of the multiple business relationship then becomes an outcome of co-ordination or orchestration practices that the participants perform. Hence, research needs first to consider the multiple enactments of such relationships between varying interactants on either side, even including boundary spanners and objects. Second, studies need to pay attention to the practices that aim to produce a singular version of the business relationship. In revisiting the business relationship concept, we will draw on rich empirical accounts and draw attention to the co-ordination or orchestration practices to produce a singular version of the relationship. By conceiving of the enactment of a singular relationship entity as an achievement rather than a starting point we can reveal the multiple and sometimes conflicting efforts to ascribe agency to specific entities and their varying associations. Analytically, we take the starting position that with multiplicity comes, as Law and Mol (2002) suggest, the need for new conceptualisations of what it might be to hold these &lsquo;versions&rsquo; together. We ask: what more could we learn about business relationships by opening the business relationship as &lsquo;black box&rsquo; and examining the variations and multiplicities that reside within it? &nbsp;</p

Emergence in marketing: an institutional and ecosystem framework

Many core marketing concepts (e.g., markets, relationships, customer experience, brand meaning, value) concern phenomena that are difficult to understand using linear and dyadic approaches, because they are emergent. That is, they arise, often unpredictably, from interactions within complex and dynamic contexts. This paper contributes to the marketing discipline through an explication of the concept of emergence as it applies to marketing theory. We accomplish this by first drawing on the existing literature on emergence in philosophy, sociology, and the theory of complex adaptive systems, and then link and extend this understanding to marketing using the theoretical framework of service-dominant (S-D) logic, particularly as enhanced by its service-ecosystems and institutionalization perspectives. Our work recognizes both emergence and institutionalization as integral or interrelated processes in the creation, maintenance, and disruption of markets and marketing phenomena. We conclude by discussing implications for marketing research and practice

Valuation Studies? Our Collective Two Cents

This article presents the results of a poll made among the members of the editorial and advisory boards of Valuation Studies. The purpose is to overview the topic that is the remit of the new journal. The poll focused on three questions: 1. Why is the study of valuation topical? 2. What specific issues related to valuation are the most pressing ones to explore? 3. What sites and methods would be interesting for studying valuation? The answers to these questions provided by sixteen board members form the basis of the article. Based on these answers, it identifies a number of themes concerning the study of valuation, elaborating on the rationale for attending to valuation, the conceptual challenges linked to this, and the specific issues and sites that deserve further attention

Searches at HERA for Squarks in R-Parity Violating Supersymmetry

A search for squarks in R-parity violating supersymmetry is performed in e^+p collisions at HERA at a centre of mass energy of 300 GeV, using H1 data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 37 pb^(-1). The direct production of single squarks of any generation in positron-quark fusion via a Yukawa coupling lambda' is considered, taking into account R-parity violating and conserving decays of the squarks. No significant deviation from the Standard Model expectation is found. The results are interpreted in terms of constraints within the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), the constrained MSSM and the minimal Supergravity model, and their sensitivity to the model parameters is studied in detail. For a Yukawa coupling of electromagnetic strength, squark masses below 260 GeV are excluded at 95% confidence level in a large part of the parameter space. For a 100 times smaller coupling strength masses up to 182 GeV are excluded.Comment: 32 pages, 14 figures, 3 table