ELSEVIER Theory, Practice, and Empirical Development Contributions Advances in Business Marketing and Purchasing Richard E. Plank WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY The six volumes of Advances in Business Marketing and Purchasing have provided the field of business marketing with a rich legacy of research theory and findings. This article provides a summary review of the two major themes found in the series related to research, contribution to theoretical development, and contribution to practice. A total of 22 articles are discussed, and their contributions in the light of both previous and newer research are described. © 1997 Elsevier Science Inc. j BUSN aES 1997. 38.235--241 dvances in Business Marketing and Purchasing has not only had an influence on the practice of academic business marketing research but clearly mirrors the growth and directions in which the field is headed, both for academic research and business practice. The last 10 years have brought major changes in the way business marketing is practiced, the rise of TQM, the move away from transactional activities toward more relationship-oriented activities, and the increasing use of technology in the marketplace, e.g., Kern (1993), Morgan and Hunt (1994), Anonymous (1994). The purpose of this article is to outline the contributions of this series of scholarly articles on the field of business marketing and purchasing by linking this work to other re- search appearing in the journals of the field or to actual practice. The article begins with a brief empirical summary of what has been done to date. After a brief discussion of the development of business marketing theory, research, and application, a selection of 22 articles from the series will be categorized using a thematic schema and evaluated. Each of the 22 articles has been chosen for either its impact on future research or its potential to impact that research. The schema chosen will divide the work into those articles whose contribu- tion is primarily theoretical and those articles whose contribu- Address correspondence to Richard E. Plank, Haworth College of Business, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008. Journal of BusinessResearch 38. 235-241 (1997) © 1997 Elsevier Science Inc. 655 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10010 tion is primarily prescriptive or managerial. Each article will be discussed on some detail with reference to both previous work and new work which has built upon that original article. To date, the six volumes have produced a total of 57 articles by 81 authors, 18 of those authors having academic affiliations outside of the United States. In addition, three of the authors were practitioners. Each volume has had a unifying thread or theme to it. Volume 1 had a pragmatic theme, each of the articles linking together research done to advise practitioners on a variety of business marketing activities. Volume 2 had a similarly pragmatic theme, but the articles all dealt with the communication function, either how to do some facet of it, or in the case of Wilson (1987), how to develop organizational buying behavior theory to better un- derstand the impact of communication and other business marketing activities. Volume 3 was primarily on modeling and how this modeling activity could help the practitioner better design and execute marketing strategies. Volume 4 centered on improving the effectiveness of busi- ness marketing, using modeling and theory building to dem- onstrate pragmatic applications in a variety of functional areas. Volume 5 centered on organizational buying purchasing strat- egy and provided an extensive examination of both the buyer actions and the dyadic perspective of buyer-seller relations using mapping procedures. Contributions have been both theoretical and pragmatic. Volume 6 has a unique perspective in that it is the first of. several to come that position themselves as handbooks. In the case of volume 6, nine different topics either considered to be critical to business marketing, or to be extremely under- researched, were chosen for inclusion. In each case, the au- thors reviewed literature for the purpose of integrating it to provide some sort of normative practice implications. While each of the themes are somewhat different, the series has generally provided outlets for several types of articles. In some instances it has offered longer and more explicit versions or papers that appeared in print in shorter versions elsewhere. ISSN 0148-2963/971517.00 PII S0148-2963(96)00131-2