Conceptualising four new social bonds in business relationships

Social bonds have been recognised by researchers as one of a number of bonds in a business relationship. Social bonds which develop between individuals can impact positively on long-term relationships at an organisational level. Although they are central to business relationships, social bonds are not as well defined, conceptualised and measured as other relationship marketing constructs. Constructs such as commitment and loyalty have been found to be multidimensional however the social bond is still generally considered to be unidimensional. One of the barriers to identifying more social bonds has been the limited use of theory in scale development. A review of the literature has suggested that social bonds may be based on attachment and liking. Attachment theory emerged from research into parent-child relationships but has more recently been found to be relevant to business relationships. Liking has been found to be a significant driver of relationship maintenance in business. However these theories have not been used so far to identify social bonds in business relationships. In the current study, attachment theory and Sternberg’s Theory of Love were used to identify four potential social bonds: security, intimacy, passion and affective commitment. A phenomenological study consisting of in-depth interviews with thirty business people was conducted to explore these potential social bonds. This paper outlines the process of conceptualising four new social bonds using theory, literature and data from primary research

Are the sungrazing comets the inner source of pickup ions and energetic neutral atoms?

We present arguments that at least part of the inner source of pickup ions in the solar wind might be the material released by sungrazing comets. Based on a statistical analysis of sungrazing comets detected over almost eight years of LASCO operation (1996 -- September 09 2004) an overwhelming majority of the observed sungrazers belong to the Kreutz group of comets, follows tightly clumped orbits and break up at $\sim 40 - 4$ solar radii in a well defined region of space. The material released from these comets could be (after ionization) an important portion of the inner source of pickup ions (PUIs), as the local mass flux of the inner source and cometary PUIs seem comparable. We indicate time intervals during the year when the cometary PUIs could be observed from a spacecraft on the Earth's orbit (from the end of July until the end of the year) and show three time intervals when they should be observable by Ulysses (from its launch time until the end of 1990, from the end of November 1994 until mid-May 1995 and from February 2001 until the end of July, 2001). We argue that the PUIs from the inner source should include both singly and doubly charged ions and that this cometary hypothesis alleviates some difficulties (in particular, the issue of hydrogen deficit) in the interpretation of the inner source as solar wind neutralized on dust grains close to the Sun.Comment: accepted by Astronomy & Astrophysic