Special issue on interfirm relationships in Russia: responding to new challenges

Citation

(2011), "Special issue on interfirm relationships in Russia: responding to new challenges", Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. 26 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/jbim.2011.08026baa.002

Special issue on interfirm relationships in Russia: responding to new challenges

Article Type: Call for papers From: Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Volume 26, Issue 5

Guest Editor: D.Sc. Olga Tretyak, National Research University "Higher School of Economics'', Faculty of Management, e-mail: otretyak@hse.ru

Topic of the special issue

Interfirm relationships in Russia recently turned into an important research topic – there are many reasons why. On the one hand, the country has regained some of its economic influence, and many international companies have established relations with local firms. On the other hand, recent turmoil stimulated local firms to acknowledge strong relationships as a source of competitive advantage (this is because weak relations often proved to be the reason for disaster). Besides, local industry leaders now have to cope with the growing complexity of relationship networks which they formerly used to control. Taken together, these factors make b2b relations in Russia an interesting field of research.

Compared with China and India, Russia has rarely been represented in international research on marketing, although there are many interesting studies on relationships between firms published in Russian (cf. Kouchtch, 2010; Radaev, 2009; Tretyak and Roumyantseva, 2006; Tretyak and Sheresheva, 2005). But it seems from the recent papers (cf. Dolgopyatova et al., 2010; Smirnova et al., 2011) that the odds are starting to change. And it may be that the recession has done a favour. After all, the result of surviving the turbulence of a recession should be that the firms are more efficient and have more intensified relationships with their consumers. But is this really the case? The topic of this special issue, ``Interfirm relationships in Russia: responding to new challenges'', is intended to spur thinking on these issues.

Concerning the challenges, some theorists would argue that we need more fine-grained theories that help understand how firms in networks adapt to an emergent environment (cf. Sheng et al., 2011). From a managerial perspective, we need to know how managers respond to recession challenges and whether fundamental rethinking of relationships would add any value. Are some recently active topics in the field more viable in this turbulent world?

This special issue welcomes all papers that address b2b relationships of Russian companies with their partners from Russia as well as other countries. We would prioritize both papers which make a substantive contribution and those which highlight practicalities. We will especially consider ``scaling-ups'' like studying coordination in value chains, or studying relationships across several countries, or tracing evolution of whole industrial markets, of course, within the JBIM's scope. We particularly encourage papers that consider all kinds of interfirm relationships along the value chains, customer involvement and customer influence on the process of interfirm coordination, consumer perspectives, international issues, and macro-level analyses.

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  Examples of possible topics for articles in the special issue demonstrate our determination to invite a broad range of potential contributions:

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  Relationship practices: empirical examples that illuminate characteristic forms of relationships and relationship portfolios, taxonomies of relationships and networks

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  Regulating mechanisms: motivations for development and/or dissolution of relationships, the role of various mechanisms in various relational situations: norms, trust, power, customer orientation

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  Relationship management: relationship management strategies, approaches to orchestrate value chains and markets, diffusion of new technologies and tools for management of relationships with customers and other partners

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  Relationship consequences: long-term results of b2b relationships, valuation of relationships and relational rents, measurements of relationship performance.

Submission of papers

Papers submitted must not have been published, accepted for publication, or presently be under consideration for publication in any other journal. Submissions should be approximately 6,000 words in length. Submissions to the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing must be made using the ScholarOne Manuscript Central system.

For more details, please visit: www.emeraldinsight.com/jbim.htm and consult the author guidelines. A separate title page containing the title, author/s, and contact information for the author(s) must be uploaded. Suitable articles will be subjected to a double-blind review. Hence, authors should not identify themselves in the body of the paper.

Submission deadline of first draft of the paper: 31 October 2011.