KOREASCHOLAR

This paper adopts an industrial network perspective on strategy. Business strategy in an interactive context has been a recurrent theme in the Industrial Marketing & Purchasing (IMP) literature for over three decades (Baraldi et al., 2007; Gadde, Huemer & Håkansson, 2003; Turnbull & Valla, 1986). The interactive context refers to how change by a company expectedly leads to changes in needs, or structures of interconnected parties (Gadde, Huemer & Håkansson, 2003). Strategy also becomes a response to changes among business partners, and any introduced change may have consequences that either reinforce or disable the intentions of the company. Based on how other parties act in parallel, try to adapt to present structures or intend to change them, outcomes are unforeseeable (Baraldi et al., 2007; Brennan, Gressetvold & Zolkiewski, 2008). Baraldi et al. (2007) even state that strategizing in an interactive context is an impossible task. Still, companies do formulate and implement strategies (Möller & Halinen, 1999). While some studies discuss actions and effects (e.g. Wilkinson & Young, 2002), a search in the EBSCO database, on business strategy and consequences/outcomes in a network context resulted in zero hits. Researchers have suggested the complexity of strategizing in an interactive context and referred such strategizing as conforming to or confronting present structures (Ford et al., 2003). Surprisingly, however, less is known about network consequences and the link to different kinds of strategies. This paper focuses on the issue. Network consequences refer to what happens in the network in terms of changed contents of relationships, and/or changed network structures. We describe the consequences as either intended or unexpected (cf. Andersson, Havila & Salmi, 2001) from the focal company’s perspective and link them to different strategies. The aim of this paper is to develop the understanding, from an industrial network perspective, of network consequences from a focal company’s perspective and how different strategies influence these. To that end the present paper bases on a case study from the optical recording media industry, and follows the Taiwanese company Ritek. The paper contributes to the growing interest for strategy in a network context and the link between different strategies and network consequences in the following ways: • Through the case study we categorize business strategies into copying, shared, reflexive, and company-rooted. These categories add to research on strategy in interactive contexts, through pointing to a more fine-tuned categorization than conforming/confronting and pointing to conforming and confronting as scale-measures rather than absolute categories. The division between company-rooted and network-challenging strategies is important as it indicates different viewpoints by the firm, and shared strategies acknowledge the net as an analytical level in networks. • The paper indicates how strategies may include other parties in terms of considerations (reflexive or copying strategies) or as joint parties (shared strategies), and how intended consequences foremost appear on that level, while unexpected consequences occur in the wider network. The paper divides unexpected network consequences into reinforcing, spin-off effects, partly disabling, and fully disabling, and thereby adds to understandings and categorizations of network consequences. • The link between strategies and network consequences points to how the more confronting the strategy, the more unexpected consequences, and also the more negative their impact on the strategy realization, which also attracts attention to the importance of including the network in strategy formulation. This adds to present understanding on strategizing in interactive contexts, and highlights the network’s impact to the strategy literature.

• Hsin-Hui Chou(National Cheng Kung University)
• Christina Öberg(Lund University)
• Tommy Tsung-Ying Shih(Lund University)