Suchergebnisse

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to promote the use of pragmatism within industrial marketing and purchasing (IMP), business-to-business (B2B)/network research with its enhanced emphasis on developing adaptable, workable solutions to practical problems. The usability of findings and the study produced means that implications and impact become a natural part of the research process rather than an afterthought concluding a research project. Although the reader might feel that the approach oscillates between viewing pragmatism in its everyday sense (through the use of terminology such as "a pragmatic approach […].," the intent is to elevate the discussion to one where pragmatism is viewed as a guiding philosophy.


Design/methodology/approach
It blends literature review and conceptual contemplation and challenges convention by "reading against the grain" (Brown and Wijland, 2018).


Findings
The authors do this to challenge convention and advocate for pluralism and diversity, theoretical evolution based on empirical evidence and increased sensitivity to the critical role of discourse, semiotics and abduction as a catalyst between theory, method and empirical activities. This conceptual blending portrays "activities" and beliefs as mutually constituted through the symbolic mediation of rhetoric and discourse.


Research limitations/implications
Existing elements of American pragmatism and discourse are identified as already a tacit constituent of the IMP oeuvre. Combining these approaches more explicitly is advocated as a suitable basis for a potential future "IMP 3" research agenda with significant potentials afforded to IMP and B2B marketing research.


Originality/value
This paper contributes to the development and dissemination of alternative and critical perspectives in marketing theory. The implication is that activities must usually be justified by actors within communication as believable and this process always involves mixtures of rational and non-rational appeals. Existing elements of American pragmatism and discourse are identified as already a tacit constituent of the IMP oeuvre. Combining these approaches more explicitly is advocated as a suitable basis for a potential future "IMP 3" research agenda with significant potentials afforded to IMP and B2B marketing research.

Purpose
This paper aims to propose an approach for exploring industrial marketing network environments through a social semiotic lens.


Design/methodology/approach
This conceptual paper introduces social semiotic perspectives to the study of business/industrial network interaction.


Findings
This paper describes how structures of meaning derived from a cultural history of signification and interpretive processes of meaning in action are co-determined in social semiosis. The meaning of environments using this social semiotic approach is emphasised, leading us to explore the idea of the "atmosemiosphere" – the most highly complex business network level, in illustrating how meaning is made through structuration between structures of meaning and their enactments in interactions between actors within living business networks.


Practical Implications
Figurative language plays an important role in the structuration of meaning. This facilitates establishing plots and, therefore, in the actors' capability to tell a story, which starts with knowing what kind of story can be told. By implication, the effective networker must be a consummate moving "picture maker" and, to do so, she must have competence in narrative, emplotment, myth-making, storytelling and figuration in more than one discursive repertoire.


Originality/value
In using a structurational discourse perspective informed by social semiotics, our original contribution is a "business networks as discursive constructions" approach, in that discursive nets, webs of narratives and stories and labyrinths of tropes are considered just as important in constituting networks as networks of actor relationships and patterns of other activities and resources.