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Emphasizing symmetry issues in business interaction analysis and IOS

Published: 25 March 2004 Publication History

Abstract

This paper argues for the need to thoroughly understand the issue of symmetry and asymmetry, when analysing business interaction supported by inter-organisational information systems (IOS). Business interaction can be defined as consisting of business communication and exchange of value. Business action theory (BAT) divides business processes into six generic phases encompassing generic, interactive actions between a seller and a buyer. Different types of exchange occur in these phases. However, the BAT phases do not, in the present version, take the issue of symmetry and asymmetry (power between suppliers and customers) into enough account. In this paper, we elaborate the concepts of symmetry and asymmetry in business interaction in order to reach a better understanding of different types of relationships. We also highlight IOS as an important means that can both facilitate symmetry and cause asymmetry in a business interaction. The aim of the paper is to enhance the applicability of BAT for business interaction analysis by including and emphasising the notion of symmetry and asymmetry.

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Cited By

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  • (2019)How far has the integrated care come? Applying an asymmetric lens to inter-organisation trust amongst health and social care organisationsInternational Entrepreneurship and Management Journal10.1007/s11365-019-00583-8Online publication date: 4-May-2019
  • (2011)Convergence of Information Security in B2B NetworksElectronic Business Interoperability10.4018/978-1-60960-485-1.ch023(571-595)Online publication date: 2011
  • (2005)Designing business process variants – using the BAT framework as a pragmatic lensProceedings of the Third international conference on Business Process Management10.1007/11678564_38(408-420)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2005

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICEC '04: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Electronic commerce
March 2004
684 pages
ISBN:1581139306
DOI:10.1145/1052220
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 March 2004

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Author Tags

  1. asymmetry
  2. business action theory
  3. business interaction
  4. inter-organisational information systems
  5. power in organisations
  6. symmetry

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View all
  • (2019)How far has the integrated care come? Applying an asymmetric lens to inter-organisation trust amongst health and social care organisationsInternational Entrepreneurship and Management Journal10.1007/s11365-019-00583-8Online publication date: 4-May-2019
  • (2011)Convergence of Information Security in B2B NetworksElectronic Business Interoperability10.4018/978-1-60960-485-1.ch023(571-595)Online publication date: 2011
  • (2005)Designing business process variants – using the BAT framework as a pragmatic lensProceedings of the Third international conference on Business Process Management10.1007/11678564_38(408-420)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2005

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