Imprinting, honeymooning, or maturing: Testing three theories of how interfirm social bonding impacts suppliers’ allocations of resources to business customers

In business markets, does strength of social bonds that a supplier perceives with a specific customer influence the supplier’s allocations of resources relative to other customers? If social bonding does uniquely impact supplier allocation of resources to customers, does the impact vary by relationship duration? Relationship marketing and Homans’ framework for social behavior are the theoretical bases for the study, which uses survey data to examine three alternative models that indicate how suppliers’ perceptions of social bonds with customers influence the suppliers’ allocations of resources over time. Analysis of data from sales and marketing managers confirms that two of these models, the imprinting theory and the maturity theory, are relevant. The findings indicate that relationship managers need to take into account the clear effect that creation of strong social bonds in buyer–seller relationships, as distinct from financial bonds, has on the way in which suppliers allocate resources to those relationships and how relationship duration affects the way in which they do so. The study strengthens the argument, on a strong theoretical base, to adopt a collaborative, as opposed to a transactional, approach to buyer–seller relationships

Social Cohesion, Structural Holes, and a Tale of Two Measures

EMBARGOED - author can archive pre-print or post-print on any open access repository after 12 months from publication. Publication date is May 2013 so embargoed until May 2014.This is an author’s accepted manuscript (deposited at arXiv arXiv:1211.0719v2 [physics.soc-ph] ), which was subsequently published in Journal of Statistical Physics May 2013, Volume 151, Issue 3-4, pp 745-764. The final publication is available at link.springer.com http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10955-013-0722-

Dynamics of organizational responses to competition

This research examines how processes of adaptation and selection operate jointly in the evolution of a population of day-care centers (DCCs) in metropolitan Toronto. We study how DCCs alter their organizational niches, defined by productive capacities and targeted resources, in response to competition and how these changes influence their survival chances. Exhibiting little structural inertia, DCCs modified their organizational niches in response to changing competitive conditions, often without any harmful effects. Indeed, DCCs that moved to less competitive organizational niches improved their survival chances. At the same time, however, competition increased rates of DCC failure and the organizational niche changes made by DCCs did not, on average, affect either the intensity of competition they faced or their longevity. We discuss the implications of these findings, which indicate that the evolution of the DCC population is a joint function of adaptation and selection processes