20th Anniversary Special Issue

Citation

Hausman, A. and Johnston, W.J. (2006), "20th Anniversary Special Issue", Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. 21 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/jbim.2006.08021gaa.001

20th Anniversary Special Issue

Angela Hausman is currently an Associate Professor at Xavier University. She holds a PhD from the University of South Florida and an MBA from the University of Pittsburgh. Her publications span both consumer behavior and business-to-business marketing and have appeared in a number of scholarly journals, including the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Services Marketing, and Journal of Consumer Marketing. In addition, she has made presentations at national and international conferences, such as AMA, ACR, and AMS. She is currently working predominantly in the areas of internet, healthcare, and international marketing.Wesley J. Johnston is the CBIM RoundTable Professor of Marketing in the J. Mack Robbinson College of Business at the Georgia State University. He is also the current editor of the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing. He assumed the editorship in 1994 and has been responsible for Volumes 9-20. It was his idea to develop this Special Issue to celebrate the 20th anniversary of JBIM. Special thanks go to the founding editor, Peter LaPlaca, for having the vision and determination to launch the journal and nurture it through the first eight volumes.

20th Anniversary Special Issue

It is an extreme honor to be associated with such a stellar group of academics and we wish to thank them for their contributions to this, the 20th Anniversary issue of the Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing. Our goal in this issue was to highlight the accomplishments of the past and provide possible pathways for future research in the area of business-to-business marketing. We approached this goal by soliciting essays from thought leaders in our discipline and the response was overwhelming. In fact, so many of our colleagues agreed to contribute to our cause that we were unable to invite papers from other, equally insightful academics. Hence, we apologize to those we were unable to include in this issue. Despite this drawback, we think that we have accomplished our goal and have produced an issue that will become a major force in directing future research.

The first set of articles in this series deals with where the discipline has been, and what more fitting way to begin than the paper by Peter LaPlaca and Wesley Johnston, who have been involved in the editorial leadership of the Journal over the course of its 20 years. The paper by Drs Lichtenthal, Iyer, Busch, and Tellefsen extends this analysis. Their contention that we are all business marketers is based on evidence that the ideology of business marketing helps give relevance and rigor to the work of academics. Drs Sheth and Sharma further extend the historical perspective by reviewing existing theoretical contributions to the business-to-business literature and suggesting voids in these theories that warrant future research. Using a format that was highly productive in Dr Sheth’s study of consumer markets, this paper presents shortages in research, arguing for more research from behavioral and individual perspectives that have been ignored in favor of those from decision-making perspectives. Next, a paper by Drs Gundlach, Bolumole, Eltantawy, and Frankle reviews the interrelated areas of supply chain management, channels, logistics, and purchasing to build a framework for future research and practice. The paper presents the domain, level of analysis, theory and methodology of each area to demonstrate the overlap in these areas that present fertile ground for this research. Finally, Dr Young reviews the advances made in understanding the pivotal role of trust in organizational relationships and suggests that job is not yet complete.

The next set of articles looks at directions for future research in business-to-business marketing, especially the interpersonal and behavioral aspects of managing relationships in an organizational network. In effect, these papers, written independently, have converged on exactly the types of future studies recommended by the authors who reviewed the historical perspectives of business-to-business marketing. I guess its true that great minds think alike. The paper by Drs Johnston and Hausman begins this section by proposing an extension of the marriage metaphor – the extended family – in understanding the complexities of business network organizations. The paper proposes a more extensive set of stages in the process, as well as non-stage related issues, such as the compensatory nature of relationships within the network. The paper ends with suggestions for how this metaphor might inform future research questions. This dovetails with the paper by Dr Bagozzi, who explores joint action in the social unit created by the business relationship as maintained by sales people. He highlights the importance of emotions in sustaining the relationship and reinforces the notion of internalization of firm values in sustaining profitability introduced in the Johnson and Hausman paper. The paper by Dr Wilkinson further explores the interactions of various actors within the network to understand how networks function. He contends that networks are not controlled by some central authority, but are shaped by the inter-relationships between individuals and firms as they share resources and adapt to environmental conditions. Following this trend is the paper by Drs Hutt and Walker, who take a similar network perspective to distinguish between high and low performing account managers. Dr Wind takes a somewhat different tack in his contribution that fits well with that of Drs Sheth and Sharma. He shows evidence and suggests the valuable contributions that might arise from the blurring of consumer and industrial markets. By merging theories, he suggests new mental models that will make our research more relevant and create more useful insights into managerial practices.

In sum, we think you’ll find much thought-provoking material in this issue. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed working with the authors to see this issue take shape. Again, we’d like to thank all the contributors and reviewers, without whom this issue would not have been possible.

Angela Hausman and Wesley J. Johnston