Managing Business Relationships: Between Service Culture and a Viable Systems Approach

Today’s business arena, as is the case in everyday life, is increasingly interconnected, highlighting the importance of relationships among people and business actors. Service culture is centred on the valorisation of relationships with clients and other interested parties in the attempt to maximise overall satisfaction, and complex service systems represent an emerging model for business experiences and competition, strengthening inter-firm relationships for the benefit of competitive advantage and long-term survival. The Viable Systems Approach (VSA) is a theoretical proposal centred on relational harmonisation among systemic actors. The purpose of this contribution is hence to deepen business relationships, attempting to analyse how to direct and manage them to promote diffuse value creation and competitiveness. This paper introduces the Viable Systems Approach and the concept of system thinking, which derives from the shift in attention from the part to the whole, implying a perception of reality as an integrated and interacting unicuum of phenomena, where the individual properties of the single parts become indistinct as the relationships between the parts themselves and the events that they produce through their interaction become more important because system elements are rationally connected. The paper then examines in greater depth the specific contributions of the VSA to inter-firm relationships within network contexts and environmental relationships, illustrating its interesting proposals and how much they are coherent with recent service research theories. Keywords: Viable Systems Approach, Inter-firm relationships, Service systems, Service culture, System interactions.