example, Berry (1983, p. 143, cited in Ferguson and Brown, 1991) defines relationship
marketing as the “process of establishing and maintaining mutually beneficial long
term relationships among organization and their customers, employees and other
stakeholders” (p. 143). Gro ̈nroos (1996, p. 7) states that the underlying aim of
relationship marketing is “to identify and establish, maintain, and enhance
relationships with customers and other stakeholders, at a profit, so that the
objectives of all parties involved are met; and this is done by mutual exchange and the
fulfilment of promises”. Contrastingly, Morris et al. (1998, p. 239) bring the aspect of
strategy in to play and suggest that relationship marketing is “a strategic orientation
adopted by both the buyer and seller organizations, which represents a commitment to
long term mutually beneficial collaboration”. While there is a lack of consensus on a
definition for relationship marketing, concepts of trust building/maintenance,
long-term commitment, and generation/ evaluation of mutual goals can be seen to
be underlying themes. Moreover, these themes marry with those central to the alliance
and partnering literature in construction (e.g. Anvuur and Kumaraswamy, 2007).
Relationship development, as a central component of exchange management, has
been recognised as a series of iterative phases (Table I). Wilson (1995) identifies partner
selection, purpose definition, boundary setting, value creation and relationship
maintenance as stages when commitment, trust, cooperation and mutual goal
development become either active or latent primary components. Active components
require significant management time and energy, whilst latent components require
limited time or attention (Wilson, 1995). Likewise, Pascale (1997) refers to five phases of
relationship development appropriate for outsourcing services as internal alignment,
partner selection, partner relationship alignment, project alignment and work process
alignment. A phased continuum is offered by Thompson and Sanders (1998)
encompassing the stages of cooperation, collaboration and coalescence. Donaldson et al.
(2001) refer to initial contact, lock-in, institutionalisation, and dissolution as
relationship development phases. Ford (1998) uses awareness, exploration,
expansion and commitment as terms to describe business interdependencies.
Conversely, Boddy et al. (2000) conceptualise relationship development in terms of
emerge, evolve, grow and dissolve. Dwyer et al. (1987) define relationship development
in marketing exchange relationships as an iterative process comprising several stages
of awareness, exploration, expansion, commitment and dissolution.
In any exchange there are contractual issues that should be addressed such as
discrete and relational transactions (Dwyer et al., 2000). A discrete transaction is the
foundation of a relationship whereby money is exchanged for a simple specified
commodity. Discrete transactions entail limited communication and narrow content.
However, prolonged relational exchange founded through dependence personal
characteristics, benefit from deeper communication, cooperative planning and higher
expectations of trustworthiness (Anvuur and Kumaraswamy, 2007; Wong et al., 2008).
Drawing on the work of several authors that have examined relationship
development/maintenance (Table I), a conceptual model is proposed in Figure 1
(e.g. Ford et al., 1985; Wilson, 1995; Araujo et al., 1999; Thompson and Sanders, 1998;
Dwyer et al., 2000; Anvuur and Kumaraswamy, 2007). There exists a morass of
research that has examined alliances since the calls of the Latham Report (1994) to
ameliorate integration and engender trust in projects. However, there have only been a
limited number of studies that have examined the relationship development process
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