To Örebro University

There is a growing call for more network-level research on sustainability within marketing that avoids a narrow interorganisational focus. Business networks have a crucial role to play in reorganising and innovating to achieve sustainability and are met with significant challenges because of the scale and scope of changes necessary. We propose connectedness as central to understanding networked, interorganisational responses to the sustainability shift. We contribute by highlighting how systemic interdependence across organisations, which is developed through business network connectedness, is core to achieving sustainable networks and sustainable markets. The text provides an overview of current research on sustainability in business networks before synthesizing six new articles that address multiple sustainability challenges. The editorial concludes with an agenda for further research arranged around four main themes, including network dynamics and measuring and valuing in investigating the transformative change needed by all business sectors.

This study addresses the lack of knowledge about inter-organizational activity coordination in the contemporary economy. Existing understanding of economic coordination within inter-organizational research is based on the three modes of organization, market, and cooperative relationship. We extend the framework of Richardson that analyses specialization and complementarity within the industrial division of labour in terms of these three coordination modes. We propose a novel mode of coordinating economic activity, namely multi-actor arrangements, which is based on the coordination of very dissimilar yet complementary activities, grounded in the principle of distributed control. This fourth mode is necessary to explain contemporary phenomena such as the circular economy and blockchain because these involve interdependencies that were previously framed as too different or unrelated to coordinate. The extension is important because it changes our understanding of mixed-mode coordination. Our proposed fourth mode enables the conceptualization of how activity interdependencies are coordinated within inter-organizational relationships and networks undergoing transformation.

Value co-creation is a core focus area in both B2B marketing and strategy research, necessitating resource utilization within and across organizational boundaries. In the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group, scholars have focused on the interactions among resources as one important way to analyze central questions about resources in business relationships and networks. This has produced a breadth of investigations and concepts that are locally defined and utilized. This may hamper further theoretical development and inhibit analytical precision. The purpose of this paper is to develop a more general shared understanding of resource interaction by identifying and explicating the key concepts used, and to assess its status as an approach. The paper synthesizes 20 years of research to identify key concepts and the relationships across concepts. This provides both a platform for further conceptual and empirical research within IMP and potential for crossfertilization with parallel B2B areas.

Despite the importance of inter-organisational information sharing (IOIS) in the public sector, such endeavours often fail. Existing research has shown that the values held by collaborating organisations are one important factor affecting these kinds of initiatives. However, research has sought only to a limited extent to address how value conflicts come into play over time. Therefore, this paper aims to explore how conflicting values shape an inter-organisational information-sharing practice in the public sector over time. Using the local/global network framework, we analyse four years’ worth of information sharing in an inter-organisational advisory group in the context of Swedish nuclear waste management. We conclude that different value conflicts are emphasised to different extents at different points in time. That is, values do not uniformly affect IOIS activities, and such conflicts over time reduce the set of potential IOIS activities. We also conclude that when IOIS activities are driven by an individual organisation’s values, individual value rational activities may co-exist with a dysfunctional long-term IOIS practice.

The concept of place, as well as physicality of place, impacts  sustainability practices in different ways. While management and organization studies have seen a rise in discussions on sustainable business models, we argue that place has lost its natural place in sustainability studies related to the business organization. Place offers a rootedness and a link to the natural, that all organizational activities are dependent on. Therefore, place has the capacity to drive and deepen sustainability practices.

The purpose of this paper is to uncover the role of place in sustainability research and organizational practice. A topic, which in sustainability research related to the business organization has been rather weakly covered. By applying an abductive research approach, we identify four different settings for the relation between place and sustainability. We then develop a place typology that shows the different roles of place in sustainability research and practice.

This article offers new knowledge on the role of industry as external facilitators in the case of designing responsible management education (RME). Drawing on a case of a Swedish business school that developed a two year master's profile in sustainable business, we find that industry partners acted as external facilitators in the form of ‘Legitimizers’. This type of external facilitator, Legitimizer, complements Vazquez-Brust and Yakovleva’s (2017) existing categories: ‘Guides’, ‘Monitors’, ‘Enablers’, and ‘Networkers’. Based on the findings, we propose that business can take on four types of legitimizing roles in academia – business collaboration: The Visitor, The Planner, The Co-operator, and The Co-educator. We further identify various forms of legitimacy, particularly cognitive and pragmatic, that the corporate activities and interactions generate. Interestingly, in the case of RME, companies are instrumental to legitimizing the education, rather than being the ones seeking legitimacy.