CfP: Special Issue on Business Capabilities, Relationships, and Networks

My colleague Martin Eisend recently pointed me to an interesting call for papers by the journal Industrial Marketing Management. Maciej Mitręga, Sebastian Forkmann, and Stephan Henneberg are editing a Special Issue on Business Capabilities, Relationships, and Networks. As the title indicates, the special issue tries to combine the literature on dynamic capabilities, relationships, and networks. These foci happen to be the pillars of the doctoral program I recently graduated from. To my knowledge, the special issue is the first type of publication that explicitly tries to to link the topics above and it is noteworthy for that reason. Deadline for submissions is October 1, 2015. You can find more information about the special issue below.

For the purposes of this special issue, and in line with Eisenhardt & Martin (2000), we define ‘capabilities’ as the organizational and strategic processes by which managers alter their resource base in order to seek new sources of competitive advantage. Thus, company capabilities may be oriented at various competitive objectives such as: new product development, superior manufacturing technology, lean and agile supply management, effective internationalization, etc. Inter-firm partnering may be helpful in achieving all of these competitive objectives through resource transfers and inter-company synergies (Dyer & Hatch, 2006; Dyer & Singh, 1998), however, it is not clear what kind of micro and macro organizational routines should be designed and implemented by managers to orient their companies to systematically and fully exploit inter-company relationships as well as networks as the lever to achieving these competitive advantages. Therefore, we call for both conceptual and empirical studies covering this phenomenon. Papers may include exploratory and confirmatory approaches and apply qualitative and/or quantitative methods. All submitted papers must be rigorous in methodological terms and address the current body of knowledge on the phenomena under investigation.