Challenging business relationships

The guest editors, Per Vagn Freytag and Thomas Ritter have collated a set of papers which focus specifically on business to business relationships. Though they admit there is already existing literature on the topic, they found that there are still many “white spots” on the relationship map. Therefore the purpose of this special issue is to shed some additional light on business relationships. The first paper, by Michael Cunningham makes a comparison between neurological networks and business networks; and he relates this to the notion of writer’s block. Schurr’s contribution deals with the basic building block of business relationships- the exchange episode. Bowery and Easton contribute to our understanding of network effects. Holmen, Pedersen and Jansen focus on the dynamic aspects of network initiatives. Whilst Freytag and Mikkelsen offer an overview of issues related to sourcing. The final paper deals with analyzing relationship governance Based on the hierarchy-markets-networks discussion, Ritter develops a framework for relationship analysis.