“…2.1 Criticality and power in business-to-business interactions Criticality is a contextual variable that creates situations intensifying the sensitivity and stress levels of parties (Holmlund-Rytkönen and Strandvik, 2005;Olkkonen and Tuominen, 2008). In the literature, criticality is addressed in various forms: the criticality of channel partners (Kim et al, 2005;Shah and Swaminathan, 2008), goods and services (Webster and Sundaram, 2009;Nath and Mahajan, 2011;Hawkins et al, 2022), relationships (Johnston and Hausman, 2006;Gedeon et al, 2009;Kumar et al, 2019) and events (Holmlund-Rytkönen and Strandvik, 2005;Newell, 2017;Li et al, 2021;Wang et al, 2021;Zhang et al, 2023). Another fundamental notion in conflict theory is power, which exhibits characteristics such as being extremely intentional, conflict-oriented and resource-centric (Dallas et al, 2017).…”