Cecilia Erixon

Information technology utilization for industrial marketing activities: the IT–marketing gap

Purpose – This study aims to investigates the possible gap between the logic of these information technology (IT) systems and industrial firms’ marketing practices. Industrial firms rely extensively on IT systems for their business. Design/methodology/approach – Based on the contemporary marketing practice (CMP) model, which depicts firms’ marketing practice as ranging from transactional to more relational and networked-based, the logic of IT systems and how users in industrial firms adopt them are amended to create an extended model. The extended model is used to analyze an in-depth case based on 63 interviews regarding one industrial firm’s business with customers and suppliers and how IT is utilized in this setting. Findings – Results show that industrial firms’ relationship-oriented business is poorly supported by currently used IT systems. This gap between the IT systems, which are transaction-focused, and industrial firms’ marketing practice, which is relationship-based, has severe effects on adopti...

Internal MNC structures’ bearing on externally embedded subsidiaries’ organizational performance

The theoretical research stream that depicts multinational companies (MNCs) as networked organizations has offered new insights on contemporary enterprises’ way of functioning. However, the majority of the research has focused on external embeddedness, that is, MNC subsidiaries’ local business relationships, and its impact on subsidiary organizational performance. This conceptual chapter addresses the lack of research focusing on internal embeddedness, that is, subsidiary relationships with headquarters and sister subsidiaries. Internal embeddedness is discussed from two dimensions: the internal production network and the MNC manager’s social network. The characteristics of each dimension and how they relate to earlier research, leads to a number of theoretical propositions. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how external and internal embeddedness relate, as well as how they may impact the subsidiary’s (organizational) performance.

Information System Providers in Business-Relationship Triads

Firms have become highly dependent on their use of information systems for daily business activities (Nakata et al. 2010). To function efficiently and provide necessary support to the firm’s business, the management of a multitude of information systems involves continuous technical updates, as well as feature additions, adapting the system to the firm’s different business situations (Brady et al. 2008; Ekman 2015; Ekman et al. 2015). Information systems generally become more standardised, yet the high expertise knowledge needed for maintenance and development of them entails that suppliers of information systems are increasingly specialised on particular systems. Furthermore, the growing number of specialised information systems, and the increasing use in business, make their operational management time-consuming, requiring high degrees of specialised knowledge. As a consequence, firms chose to move the management of information systems to external parties providing the systems (IS-providers). This phenomenon has been described as information system outsourcing, with research on the topic mainly placing attention to the strategic process of management decisions on when to outsource and to whom (Lacity and Hirschheim 2012; Rivard and Aubert 2015). Outsourcing effectively means that the firm, not only for internal needs, but also for their ongoing business undertakings in marketing, sales and purchasing, relies heavily on IS-providers for business performance (Heckman 1999). Due to increasing numbers of information systems and information system providers (IS-providers), firms can no longer rely on one single IS-provider but nowadays have a complex arrangement involving multiple IS-providers for the diverse information systems utilised in business (Gallivan and Oh 1999).