۱- Introduction

۲- Setting the context and the nature of industrial marketing work

۳- Agency of industrial marketing work

۴- Industrial marketing work and CSCW insights

۵- Contributions to the special issue

۶- Conclusion

References

Abstract

Peter Drucker once remarked that everything degenerates into work, and if it does not degenerate into work, nothing gets done. This special issue presents our vision for generating more analytical attention to the nature of industrial marketing work and to explore ways in which future research can contribute to this nascent research area. In this introductory article we seek to scope out an agenda for taking some of the themes of industrial marketing work further. In particular, the review points to the opportunities within industrial marketing, drawing on the intersections of Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic agency approach with the neoinstitutional and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) fields of study. It then highlights the useful contributions of the papers in this special issue. Our contribution lies in advancing new avenues for researching and, in so doing, ensuring something gets done to research this nascent area.

Introduction

A cornerstone of the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) Group is that business entities are interrelated networks (Halinen, Salmi, & Havila, 1999). The concept of networks is accordingly one that simultaneously emphasises both ‘net’ and ‘work’. There is therefore a natural synergy between work-based perspectives and industrial marketing studies. However, it is fair to say that there is more attention on ‘net’ centred research rather than the ‘work’ centred research – a point well made by several industrial marketing authors (Finch & Geiger, 2011; Mason, Friesl, & Ford, 2017). This special issue presents our vision for rebalancing this and giving more analytical prominence to the nature of industrial marketing work. The seven papers in this special issue are thus an important and promising step towards building on this industrial marketing work agenda. The task now, of course, is to go further. This introduction commentary will therefore scope out topics for an industrial marketing work agenda and also highlight some of the most promising ideas from this special issue. In this editorial we comment upon themes that emerge from the papers included in this issue: the nature of industrial marketing work, the role of work agency and the challenge of researching work. To do this, we draw upon a number of research literatures: Gilbert Ryle’s question ‘What does work consist of?’ helps us to ‘zoom in’ on what people actually do in industrial marketing work, while Margret Archer’s (1995) morphogenetic cycle approach helps us to frame industrial work agency in terms of the reflexive nature of that work; the neoinstitutional and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) perspectives also shed further conceptual light on the nature of that work. The next section initially considers the setting for the ‘turn to work’ perspective. The paper concludes with outlining the selected papers within the special issue.