Search results

Prior to conducting business via the Web, business partners agree on the business processes they are able to support. In ebXML, the choreography of these business processes is described as an instance of the so‐called business process specification schema (BPSS). For execution purposes the BPSS must be defined in the exact business context of the partnership. Reference models for B2B processes developed by standard organizations usually span over multiple business contexts to avoid a multitude of similar processes. In this paper we present how business collaboration models following the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM) are expressed in ebXML BPSS. To allow a mapping from multi‐context business collaboration models to a context‐specific choreography in ebXML BPSS we extend UMM to capture constraints for different business contexts

Modern enterprises face a strong economical pressure to increase competitiveness, to operate on a global market, and to engage in alliances of several kinds. In order to meet the requirements and challenges of participating in such alliances, companies must be able to cooperate effectively and efficiently. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of some major directions in inter‐organizational cooperation.

In order to cope with the challenges of inter‐organizational cooperation, to share innovative research issues and to facilitate profound discussions about them, the authors organized a series of workshops on Modeling Inter‐Organizational Systems (MIOS‐CIAO!) starting at the annual OTM Federated Conference and Continuing at the Annual CAiSE Conference. This paper summarizes the results of the workshops.

This paper provides an overview of what has been established and what is going on regarding the cooperation of enterprises in networks. The focus has been on the modeling of cooperation, from the business level down to the implementation level.

This overview is a useful source of knowledge for those who want to have a quick insight in the relevant aspects of cooperation, and in many well‐known modeling approaches and techniques. It is also an inspiring source for those who want to investigate yet unsolved or unsatisfactorily solved problems. Although developments, both in theory and in practice, will go on, no landslides are expected. Particularly for practice, the value of this report will therefore last for a considerable time.

Several core notions in the area of inter‐organizational cooperation are clarified, such as collaboration, cooperation, enterprise network, choreography, and orchestration. The whole process of developing or investigating an enterprise network is covered.

The purpose of this paper is to is focus on the role of geographic co‐location in the development of firm‐level marketing externalities.

A mail survey and quantitative analysis were used to examine the effect of co‐location on externalities. Fast growing salmon farming clusters in Scotland and Chile were chosen where most environmental variables could be controlled. These clusters enjoy business to business marketing practices.

Respondents indicated several externalities yielded by co‐location such as buying intermediate goods, enhanced reputation and joint participation in trade fairs. However, other externalities such as providing access to new technology and referrals to other firms were only slightly indicated useful as produced by co‐location.

Practitioners in the salmon farming industry are suggested to pursue inter‐cluster cooperation.

While previous findings are conflicting, the contribution of this study within the limits of its sample is in differentiating the specific traditional and marketing externalities in which co‐location is beneficial for clustered firms.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role and influence of cultural intermediaries in the developing wine markets of Japan and Singapore by taking a discursive view of relationships amongst these cultural intermediaries, as well as between them and various members of the supply chain in international wine marketing – including consumers.

The authors explore cross‐cultural issues by taking a discursive perspective to studying representations of self, and of inter‐organizational and inter‐personal relationships in the global wine business, specifically through the analysis of a series of accounts of cultural intermediaries and key stakeholders involved in potentially influencing the extent to which New Zealand wines achieve a greater presence in the Japan and Singapore marketplaces.

In their talk, participants explicitly (and sometimes implicitly) construct “vertical” relationships with downstream and upstream supply chain actors (consumers and producers, respectively) as needing guidance or assistance that seemingly only they are capable of providing. They also construct “horizontal” relations with fellow cultural intermediaries. In these discursive constructions, evaluative positioning often occurs, as the various actors are constructed positively or negatively, depending on the nature of the legitimisation sought by the speaker as they seek to justify their contribution to the network.

The insights gained through an examination of discourse should help B2B practitioners in the increasingly globalising wine industry to navigate through the complexity of emerging wine markets in the Asian context.

The paper's contribution is in looking at these cultural intermediaries as cultural bridges in the context of “sophisticated globalization” in specific Asian societies not traditionally known for wine‐drinking.

This chapter briefly explores selected English and general education policy documents, curricula, and textbooks within the context of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) from a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective and examines how they have changed pre- and post-21st century. First, a policy document related to education in KSA in general (pre-21st century) is analyzed along with an English language teaching (ELT) policy document of the same period. Next, two general policy documents post-21st century are explored, followed by one related to ELT policy. Finally, one post-21st century document related to higher education is discussed. The “network of practices” within which these documents are situated are first detailed, as well as the structural order of the discourse, and some linguistic analysis of the choice of vocabulary and grammatical structures (Meyer, 2001). Issues which might be problematic to the learning and teaching identities of the students and teachers interpreting these documents are also highlighted. Finally, we consider whether the network of practices at this institution and KSA in general “needs” the problems identified in the analysis and critically reflect on the analysis.

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to develop a conceptual framework for studying value creation derived from an ethical perspective, in a business marketing context. Design/methodology/approach – First, a conceptual and comparative analysis is made of the ethics and value concepts in two research traditions: the stakeholder approach and the business network approach. Second, a conceptual framework is developed that contains tools for conducting research on value co‐creation in business networks from an ethical perspective. An exemplifying case study from the paper industry is included. Findings – Four key concepts are proposed for further research into ethics and value creation in business networks that enable the study of ethical embeddedness: ethical network identity, ethical role, ethical position, and ethical atmosphere. The analysis also presents fundamental differences between the stakeholder and the business network approaches when dealing with ethics and value. Research limitations/implications – The developed conceptual framework should be applied in more extended empirical settings to evaluate its usefulness. Practical implications – The paper provides an ethical perspective for understanding value in industrial markets using a network approach. Originality/value – The study presents a novel approach to incorporating ethics and value creation to an industrial marketing context. Ethical issues are traditionally studied using stakeholder, agency or institutional perspectives and such research in business‐to‐business contexts is almost non‐existent. The business network approach contains very few studies from an ethical point of view. The paper covers this gap and offers a starting‐point for further inquiry into this field.

Innovativeness is crucial for industrial cluster firms to gain sustained competitive advantage. This study aims to investigate the effects of inter-firm coopetition on firm innovativeness within a cluster and examines the moderating role of institutional support.

This research adopts an empirical survey method using multi-source data from 181 industrial cluster firms. Regression is used to test the hypotheses of this study.

The results show that cooperation and constructive conflict promote firm innovativeness, while destructive conflict is detrimental to firm innovativeness. Moreover, the study also finds that cooperation interacts with both types of conflict to affect firm innovativeness, where cooperation and constructive conflict interact negatively on firm innovativeness, while cooperation and destructive conflict interact positively on firm innovativeness. In addition, institutional support weakens the effects of cooperation and destructive conflict on innovativeness, respectively, but has no significant moderating effect on the relationship between constructive conflict and innovativeness.

These findings enrich the current research on coopetition. The interaction effects of cooperation and both types of conflict on innovativeness deepen the concept of coopetition and responds to the call to further explore the interaction effects within coopetition. The moderating role of institutional support fills a gap in the empirical research on the role of institutional factors affecting coopetition on innovation and also provides valuable suggestions for firm managers and governments in industrial clusters.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate business process management (BPM) and accounting on a conceptual level in order to account for the economic implications of process-state changes in process design-time and process run-time.

The paper adopts a design science research paradigm. The research, grounded in an “events” approach to accounting theory, builds on the REA accounting model that has been adapted for the design of a process accounting model (PAM).

The paper presents a PAM that can be used to structure event records in process-aware information systems (PAIS) to enable process-oriented accounting. The PAM is specified as a light weight data structure that is intended for the integration of PAIS and accounting information systems.

As this paper is technical in nature, more research is needed to evaluate more thoroughly its approach in naturalistic settings.

The PAM can support traditional accounting approaches, and because of the adopted events approach, it readily supports use cases related to real-time analytics in BPM and accounting.

The PAM presents a novel approach to integrating BPM and accounting. The novelty of this approach lies in its use of event records to document flows of economic resources.