Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThe motivation behind this special issue is the growing interest in how firms and marketing practitioners can better manage their resources to improve firm performance and customer relationships. The special issue contains a range of theoretical and empirical articles that examine resource management from both the customer and supplier perspectives. The seven articles presented here address the topics of resource collaboration, social capital and resource dependency, accessing customer resources, resource mobilization, resource investment, the importance of social bonds, and inhibitors to resource collaboration.This special issue provides a compilation of up-to-date original research into the topic of resource management including resource transmission through, and resource creation within, buyerseller relationships. Interest in the transmission and accessibility of resources in relationships is long-standing in the sociology literature (McCarthy and Zald, 1977). The management and combination of resources (Morgan and Hunt, 1999) in buyer-seller relationships are recent research topics in the marketing (Cantù et al., 2012) and supply chain (Ellegaard et al., 2003) literature. Interest in these topics in the marketing literature has intensified recently, particularly as interest in the co-creation of value (Vargo and Lusch, 2004) increases as well as further discussion about the contribution of resource-based theory in marketing (Kozlenkova et al., 2014). The nature of relationship resources, the availability of resources from one partner in a relationship to the other, and ways in which one partner might encourage the other to make resources available, and thus become attractive to the other (Baxter, 2012;Schiele et al., 2012;Zhang et al., 2013), are explored in this special issue.The Schiele and Voss article examines, from the customer perspective, the resource implications of collaborating with the supplier. Many industrial customers are wary of becoming too dependent on a particular supplier, which may comprise a customer's competiveness in the longer term. Using survey research, the authors find that being dependent on a supplier can be positive, not negative as hypothesized. However the perceived attractiveness of the buyer to the supplier has an even greater effect on the supplier's contribution to innovation. The authors show that the attractiveness of the buyer can mediate the effects of relationship dependence.Schiele, Essig, Ellis, Henke, and Kull in their article discuss the issue of supplier satisfaction. Much industrial marketing research has addressed customer satisfaction; however supplier satisfaction is important, especially if the customer wishes to develop the business relationship any further. Schiele, Essig, Ellis, Henke, and Kull consider two theoretical perspectives, namely, social capital theory and resource dependency theory. The social capital perspective reflects the impact of structural, cognitive and relationship capital on supplier satisfaction. In contrast, when suppl...