Business marketing: Perspectives from the markets-as-networks approach

To us as academics the ideas of the Markets-as-Networks tradition have alwa ys seemed to be attractive and engaging. These frameworks have also yielded a positive response from our post-experience students in particular. Invar iably their response is "... this is exactly how it happens in my business. .." However, some practitioners view the Markets-as-Networks literature as difficult and inaccessible. In academic circles many beyond the tradition h ave little knowledge of the central ideas or their wider applications. This paper goes some small way to rectifying this problem, by briefly reviewing the theoretical principles of the Markets-as-Networks approach and their i mplications for marketing practitioners. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.