The IMP research on business networks: a systematic literature review and research agenda

Simone Guercini (), Antonella La Rocca () and Andrea Perna ()
Additional contact information
Simone Guercini: Università degli Studi di Firenze
Antonella La Rocca: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Andrea Perna: Università Politecnica delle Marche

Italian Journal of Marketing, 2024, vol. 2024, issue 2, No 2, 149-175

Abstract: Abstract More than 40 years of Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) research have revealed that in b2b markets, business exchange is carried out in continuous buyer–seller relationships. This involves direct and indirect interaction and dynamics resulting in significant related social and material investments and in extensive interdependencies that confer on the business landscape a market-as-network structure. Since the introduction of this ideas, research on business networks has been richly alimented by researchers of the IMP community. Yet, we do not have a clear overview of what this literature has covered in the last twenty years (in the period 2002–2022), in parallel with the many changes that have affected business landscape. With this study, we aim to examine what is the status of the last 20 years of IMP literature specifically dealing with the business networks level of analysis (45 articles) and to offer key directions for imminent research in this domain while analyzing and synthesizing extant literature.

Keywords: Business networks; IMP; Buyer-seller relationships; Interdependencies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s43039-024-00096-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ijmark:v:2024:y:2024:i:2:d:10.1007_s43039-024-00096-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer.com/journal/43039

DOI: 10.1007/s43039-024-00096-5

Access Statistics for this article

Italian Journal of Marketing is currently edited by Daniele Dalli

More articles in Italian Journal of Marketing from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().