Marketing, Strategic Planning and the Theory of the Firm

Abstract

The strategic planning process is inextricably linked with the issue of corporate goal formulation. It is argued that greater progress will be made in understanding marketing's participation in strategic planning if marketing's role in the goal formulation process can be explicated. Unfortunately, the extant theories of the firm are inadequate in varying degrees for this purpose. A new theory of the firm is proposed that attempts to specify the role of marketing and the other functional areas in the goal setting and strategic planning process.

Enabling Guanxi Management in China: A Hierarchical Stakeholder Model of Effective Guanxi

“…Given the networking and hierarchical nature of guanxi, we adopt the broad view of stakeholders in our model to identify necessary guanxi coalitions in Chinese business communities. In addition to Mitchell et al's (1997) stakeholder salience theory, our model uses aspects of Anderson's (1982) constituency theory, because constituency theory describes how resource coalitions are formed and managed in relation to the firm's goal hierarchy. We will briefly describe these two theoretical models to establish the conceptual foundations for our model of guanxi.…”

“…Anderson's constituency theory Anderson (1982) suggests a constituency theory of firm survival by drawing upon the behavioral model of the firm (Cyert and March, 1963;Simon, 1964) and the resource-dependence model of the firm (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978). The gist of this theory is that a business firm is viewed as a coalition of resources or interests, internal and external alike, and that the firm's survival is dependent on obtaining the needed resources from the external coalitions through the efforts of the internal coalitions (Table I).…”

“…This model of guanxi is built on stakeholder salience theory (Mitchell et al, 1997) and constituency theory (Anderson, 1982) to identify ''Who and What Really Counts'' (Freeman, 1994) -and among those who count, who counts more. Mitchell et al (1997) suggest that the stakeholder attributes: power, legitimacy and urgency, will both identify stakeholders and facilitate assessments of their salience.…”

“…Mitchell et al (1997) suggest that the stakeholder attributes: power, legitimacy and urgency, will both identify stakeholders and facilitate assessments of their salience. Similarly, Anderson (1982) distinguishes between internal and external coalitions of a firm and suggests that firm survival is predicated on the negotiation of resources from various external coalitions through the efforts of the firm's internal coalitions. In this article, we draw upon these two theories to identify and organize hierarchically the guanxi partners that, in providing resources for firm survival (thereby possessing power, legitimacy and urgency), become the most salient or definitive stakeholders.…”

“…In the following section, we therefore first define effective guanxi, arguing that in Chinese business communities, guanxi is in essence a coalitional relationship based on the resource exchanges that are at the core of stakeholder salience. Second, guided by constituency theory (Anderson, 1982), we develop a hierarchical stakeholder model of guanxi to identify necessary guanxi partners and distinguish between and among important guanxi and less important guanxi participants, and we introduce eight propositions that flow from the analysis. We conclude: with a brief summary, with some implications of our framework for instrumental stakeholder theory research, and with three key implications for guanxi management in practice.…”