The Need for an Expanded Conceptual Framework

The marketer must manage three sets of relationships--with customers, with suppliers, and with resellers. In both industrial buyer-seller relationships and in manufacturer-reseller relationships, we are talking about interorganizational relationships. In the microeconomic paradigm, the units of analysis are products, prices, firms, and transactions. In the new world of marketing management, we must also look at people, processes, and organizations.

Marketing scholars face two mandates for the 1990s. The first is to develop an expanded view of the marketing function within the firm, one that specifically addresses the role of marketing in firms that go to market through multiple partnerships and that is sensitive to the multiple levels of strategy within the organization. The second is to develop a base of empirical research that broadens our understanding of the forces leading to the development of long-term customer relationships, strategic partnerships with vendors, alliances for the codevelopment of technologies, and the issues involved in creating, managing, and dissolving these partnerships over time. Whereas the historical marketing management model has depended most heavily on economics, statistics, mathematics, psychology, and social psychology, the broadened view of the marketing function calls for work that spans the disciplines of political economy, organizational psychology, legal analysis, political science (government), and cultural anthropology.

In contrast to the microeconomic paradigm and its emphasis on prices, the political economy paradigm is better suited to understanding these firm-to-firm relationships. This is the argument first presented by Johan Arndt in articles published in 1979, 1981, and 1983. The political economy paradigm looks at marketing organizations as social systems--"dynamic, adapting, and internally differentiated. Important dimensions of marketing behavior are authority and control patterns, distributions of power, conflict and conflict management, and external and internal determinants of institutional change" (Arndt 1983, p. 52). Political economy has obvious potential to help us understand the role of marketing in managing relationships with other organizations and in developing support within the firm for activities necessary to respond to the changing marketplace. The political economy model has recently been applied most aggressively in the study of channel conflict (Dwyer, Schurr, and Oh 1987; Frazier 1983), but it offers solid potential for better understanding of all types of relationships and alliances in marketing (Day and Klein 1987). It is cited here as evidence of the availability of alternative conceptualizations of the functions of marketing to move the field beyond its historically narrow focus on transactions and prices based on the traditional microeconomic paradigm.