The complexity of power relationships within a network

There is a strong tradition of interaction, relationship and network research in the industrial and manufacturing areas of business-to-business markets (Håkansson, 1982, Turnbull and Valla, 1986, Dwyer, Schurr and Oh, 1987, Ford, 1990, 1997, Håkansson and Snehota, 1995). It is accepted that investigation of service business-to-business markets is relatively underdeveloped (although there are notable exceptions such as: Yorke, 1990, Halinen, 1994 and Tyler, 1997). In order to develop theory in the area of service business markets, the networks of buyer-seller relationships that exist in a service business-to-business environment were investigated by the researcher. Three, in-depth case studies were undertaken in the UK National Health Service (NHS). In these case studies the complex sets of relationships between the purchasers and providers of community health care (this includes health visiting, district nursing and therapies such as chiropody and physiotherapy) were investigated. This paper reports our findings about how a complex set of power interactions revealed themselves in the context of a network situation. The concept of power in networks has already been discussed by authors such as Thorelli (1986) and Axelsson (1992). However, our findings suggest that there were different levels of power within the network and hence we propose a new model for analyzing power in a network situation. This model shows how levels of power within a network can be described in terms of a pyramid which comprises: personal power (internal), organizational power (organizational) and indirect power (network). These findings suggest that managers need to be aware of the different levels of power and how they affect decisions to allocate and/or control resources such as finance, people, materials, expertise and knowledge. They also suggest that managing indirect power flows, i.e. the ability to influence the network, media or political action is an important management task. These research findings and associated theoretical developments are important because it opens up a number of areas for further research. For instance, are these findings specific to the NHS? Or can they be applied more widely, in service or industrial markets? Additionally, the model requires further development in areas such as whether the different levels of power have equal weightings. 1 Judy Zolkiewski is at Manchester School of Management, UMIST, PO Box 88, Manchester, M60 1QD, UK. E-mail: [email protected]