Adapting in business relationships: A dialogical human approach

Business-to-business markets in which human-social-actors manage shared resources and activities embedded in joint relationships form key tenets of the business network approach. We present a research frame for scrutinizing the role of individuals as central human-social actors when jointly sensing, developing, and socio-mentally adapting for upcoming futures. From this standpoint we introduce “shared sensemaking” with a focus that resides within future business relationships. This approach deals with how a confluence for adapting between interdependent companies occurs and unfolds through dialogical interactions by social human actors. In dialogical interactions, individuals being social in nature are involved in “shared sensemaking” inside a business process of future creating. This type of public socio-mental adapting by managers denies the idea of atomistic individual decision making inherent in much business-to-business research. Intra-human reflections in a dialogical world relate to public dialogues. We thus propose the following temporally held concepts of a relationship dialogue: “face”, in-between, network context, situation, and aspects as waypoints for researchers in understanding human socio-mental adaptive change inside business relationships. This conceptual approach follows a social constructionist and qualitative inquiry, which is strongly temporal and focused upon managers’ shared sensemaking.