Concurrence, transition and evolution : perspectives of industrial marketing change processes

Abstract: This is a dissertation (consisting of two volumes) dealing with industrial marketing change processes. The study explores a key theoretical and practical problem in industrial marketing; how to create major organizational marketing change in large and complex industrial companies. The study focuses on the interplay between longitudinal, strategic changes in marketing operations and the moving contexts in which they emerge. On theoretical and empirical grounds a number of perspectives on industrial marketing change processes become apparent. In the analysis of a set of focal marketing change episodes, several structural-contextual and temporal focuses are featured. Marketing change episodes are viewed as embedded in a set of concurrent change processes. They are also part of marketing system transitions, building on, while breaking with, the structures of prior changes, moving towards new states of functioning. Marketing change episodes are also viewed as embedded in more long-term, historical processes of change. Putting in focus the industrial marketing change processes, the study embraces the idea of an inseparable relationship between change and stability. The study of the dynamic interplay between marketing change agency and moving contexts concludes with a set of theoretical and managerial issues. The empirical part of the study describes a set of marketing organization changes in Pharmacia Biotech AB between 1989 and 1993. These reorganization processes are the focus of a historical study of the company covering the period 1959-1995, including a prologue starting in the 1930s. This volume complements a separate case study volume entitled "The Emergence and Change of Pharmacia Biotech 1959-1995 - The Power of the Slow Flow and the Drama of Great Events".