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Management of Relationships: The Importance of the Intangible Factors

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Book cover Relations of Complex Organizational Systems

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Abstract

In many business-to-business markets firms don’t make transactions — they establish business relationships. Ongoing streams of theoretical and empirical research documents: on many markets exchange takes place within a setting of a long-term relationship rather than a spot-market transaction. This is confirmed by our own research. The empirical findings of several large-scale studies consistently show that a large part of the existing national and international inter-organisational business-to-business relationships of established German firms have a mean duration of more than ten years1. This is a long time-span, compared to the planning literature where five years are often considered as a long-term horizon. Of course, there is considerable variance but nevertheless it appears that a long-term relationship is a widespread and typical phenomenon, which already exists since many years2.

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Authors
  1. Hans Georg Gemünden
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Strasburg University (Robert Schuman), USA

    Sabine Urban (Professor, Head) (Professor, Head)

  2. CESAG (Centre of Managerial Research)/I.E.C.S., USA

    Sabine Urban (Professor, Head) (Professor, Head)

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© 1999 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden

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Gemünden, H.G. (1999). Management of Relationships: The Importance of the Intangible Factors. In: Urban, S. (eds) Relations of Complex Organizational Systems. Gabler Verlag, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-96437-3_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-96437-3_7

  • Publisher Name: Gabler Verlag, Wiesbaden

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-409-11487-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-322-96437-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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