A company’s ability to change its position (its relationships with others) depends on a shared interpretation among business network actors of what the company wants to do. The purpose of this study is to examine change in the position of actors in a business network setting. We use the institutional work approach to understand positioning in a business network as an institutional arrangement and explore actors’ purposive efforts to maintain or disrupt the rules of the game. We use a multiple case-study approach to explore the fruit and vegetable distribution channel. We discuss what happens when the institutional work carried out by retailers to disrupt the position of wholesalers meets the institutional work carried out by wholesalers to maintain their position. The findings show how interacting institutional efforts result in new positions for wholesalers: the “troubleshooter” position and the “quality enhancer” role. Our study contributes to the field of business-to-business marketing in that it sheds light on the cocreation process of the rules of the game that drive business-to-business interactions. With reference to institutional theory, our study draws on the idea that institutional arrangements are unanticipated consequences of interactions between actors.

Introduction

One central issue for a company in a business network is how it is going to interact with other companies. Interaction with other companies is the means by which a company is going to mobilize and integrate resources (Håkansson & Waluszewski, 2002; Mouzas & Naudé, ۲۰۰۷; Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978), and, eventually, this co-creates value (Vargo & Lusch, 2016). Change – for a company in a business network – means changing its interactions with other companies (Anderson, Havila, Andersen & Halinen, 1998). Any such change therefore results in establishing new ways of mobilizing and integrating resources. However, changes may only happen if other actors in a network accept them. For Abrahamsen, Henneberg and Naudé (۲۰۱۲), the ability of a company to change its position (its relationships with others) “is dependent on a shared interpretation” of what the company wants to do (its role, cf. Anderson et al., 1998). The central issue for a company then becomes less one of ‘how to interact with others’ and more ‘how to make others share the way I see interaction with them’. Several authors have already identified such an issue. Möller (2010), along with Mouzas, Henneberg & Naudé (۲۰۰۸), emphasizes the importance of “sense-making”. Huemer (2012) discusses the concept of sense-giving as “attempts to alter and influence the way others think and act” (: ۲۴۱). Yet, the nature of what could guide interaction, as a value co-creation process and in a way that is shared by both parties, is not entirely clear within such concepts.