Converging and diverging views on interacting resources. How actors deal with conflicting logics in a multi-sectoral partnership

Abstract

This paper relies on an in-depth case study of a multi-sectoral partnership in the area of antibiotics to analyze how the involved actors' logics and views on specific resources converge and diverge and how the actors deal with these convergent and divergent views. Theoretically, we combine the resource interaction approach of the IMP (Industrial Marketing & Purchasing) view with literature on institutional logics. We find that actors from so different sectors as industry, academia, healthcare and government follow different and partly conflicting logics, but these differences do not hinder collaboration. Convergence and divergence of views vary depending on the specific resource and issue at hand. Some resources are more open to multiple interpretations (antibiotics in our case), with each group of actors attaching their logics to a particular facet of a resource, which allows keeping the logics separate thorough “segmenting”; whereas other resources are less open to interpretations (confidential information in our case) and intensify the conflicts between the actors' logics, which can only be solved via intense negotiations leading to “compromising”. Finally, emergency situations (helping Covid 19 patients in our case) downplay conflicts between the logics and enable “adapting and combining” them, as actors' rely on the logics' complementarity.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Industrial Marketing Management, 2026 · DOI ↗