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Introduction
In the call for papers for this Special Issue of the Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, the guest editors refer to the fact that the IMP Group has transformed our understanding of inter-organizational networks and their roles in international business-to-business markets. The IMP scholars developed a concept of business interactions between actors (Håkansson, 1982; Håkansson and Snehota, 1995, 2017; Håkansson et al., 2009; Ford et al., 2010). This interaction is considered the substance of business, the “universality of business relationships” (Håkansson and Snehota, 1995, p. 4). Companies are considered Actors who engage in interactions and develop relationships. Actors are treated like black boxes and the IMP research focuses on the interactions and the relationships themselves. In the seminal Actors-Resources-Activities (ARA) Model (Håkansson and Snehota, 1995), the Actors are described by their relations to resources and activities, but the question remains: what determines the behavior of the Actors in these relations? Moreover, companies as Actors are composed of individuals who work for the company, but the IMP research has only a few scattered remarks about the individual actors (Medlin and Törnroos, 2007). Therefore, the individual Actors need better understanding. The need for further clarification of the concept of an individual Actor was hinted already in the introduction to the ARA model (Håkansson and Snehota, 1995).
Besides the universal character of the interaction, the IMP research also emphasizes the uniqueness of each interaction (Håkansson, 1982; Håkansson et al., 2009). By doing so, the IMP theory gives a solid explanation about the substance, the general characteristics of the business interaction and at the same time as to the infinite particularities of the business interactions. The various yet typical ways of doing business create similarity structures of business relationships. Conceptually, it means that there are mid-level categories between the strict universality of the ARA structures and the individuality of each particular business relationship as postulated by the ARA model.
However, there is a missing middle-level explication, which could be explained in terms of the business interaction variations. Several IMP researchers call for a theoretical development (Håkansson, 2006; Axelsson, 2010) of the interaction approach or for an explanation of the business interaction patterns. In this paper we follow the call of the IMP researchers...