ارزش ذاتی روابط بنگاه به بنگاه: طبقه بندی تجربی

This article presents a new taxonomy of business relationship value consisting of four dimensions: personal, financial, knowledge and strategic value that reach beyond the cost/benefit conception of value that dominates existing literature. This new taxonomy is useful for understanding how participants in business-to-business interactions assess relationship value. The taxonomy accounts for all textual references to relationship costs, benefits and intrinsic value in this case-based research. Perceptions of relationship value are not always organizationally consistent because relationships are social constructions. Instead, the evaluation of relationship value is ultimately in the historic and social context of the focal relationship, other relationships, and expectations of the future.

Research broadly recognizes the importance of building and maintaining relationships in business-to-business marketing. However, researchers largely assume that the decision to engage in relational interaction or keep exchange at arm's-length when dealing with other parties is based on the costs in building and maintaining relationships versus the expectation of increasing revenues, as if relationship value could only be assessed from a rather utilitarian perspective. Relationship value in business marketing research generally takes a cost/benefit form, in which one party chooses to invest in building a relationship with another party in the expectation that the benefits will outweigh the sacrifices made to build such relationship (Cannon and Homburg, 2001, Lapierre, 2000 and Ulaga and Eggert, 2006). However, in the business-to-consumer literature some research has taken a broader perspective and identifies other types of value—for instance consumer value—that rejects the merely utilitarian perspective (Babin et al., 1994, Holbrook, 1999 and Sánchez-Fernández and Iniesta-Bonillo, 2007). In addition to the cost/benefit dominance, much of the published work described below is conceptual in nature, rather than grounded in empirical research. This article addresses the paucity of empirical research into relationship value by posing the fundamental question: How do relational actors identify and classify different forms of relationship value? This paper adopts a social constructionist view of business relationships regarding relationships as social constructions that result from the interaction between two or more companies over time. The value conferred on these relationships is also socially constructed by the parties in interaction. As business practices change, the perceived value of business relationships also changes. Thus, this research aims to develop an empirically based taxonomy that captures the different types of value that individuals attribute to business relationships, while simultaneously portraying how value perceptions change as different contextual conditions impact relationship dimensions.

This paper contributes to studies of business relationships using the network approach. Outcomes of this research support the idea of multiple actors forming the context on which interaction occurs and explains differences in relationship value assessment by different relational actors permitting the detachment of relationship value from the traditional cost/benefit approach. The paper extends the current typology and offers operational definitions for four dimensions of relationship value in the context of business-to-business marketing siding with Lindgreen and Wynstra's (2005) call to distinguish between value of goods and services from value of buyer–seller relationships. This study also contributes to clarify the difference between relationship value and satisfaction. Future research on business to consumer and service marketing can rely on this study as their findings are consistent with the current views of value co-creation where buyers and sellers create and appropriate in interaction value that otherwise may not exist. The number of occurrences of a particular dimension in this research data is not a good indicator of one dimension of value being more important than others as the process of data gathering was issue-driven. Business-to-business relationships can deliver value in one or more of the four dimensions, each of which is indicated by a number of sub-dimensions that may or may not be present depending on the context in which the relationships are constructed.