Business network paradoxes: A literature review and co-evolutionary perspective

Abstract

How can studying paradoxes in business networks help understand the networks' adaptation and survival? IMP identifies three central paradoxes influencing business networks: i) Development of Relationships vs. Inability to Change, ii) Controlling vs. Effectiveness, and iii) Stability vs. Change. Studying them seems critical to knowing how interdependent participants in business networks adapt to one another. To do that, we use a co-evolutionary lens to review 41 articles dealing with business network paradoxes from an IMP perspective. Results of the Reflexive Thematic Analysis underline that salient tensions mainly originate from weak coordinating norms, resource misallocation, the relationship of newness and aging, and Machiavellian behaviour. As the main value of our work, we then advance that embracing a co-evolutionary perspective can help shed novel light on these paradoxes by contrasting the factors that make the tensions salient with those able to overcome them. Specifically, we identify moral behaviour, structuration of the network, network capability development, and co-adaptation as four main factors that mitigate the paradoxes and help networks' adaptation and survival. Accordingly, we advocate a co-evolutionary conceptual framework regarding paradoxes and outline five co-evolutionary claims as implications for research and practice.