Managing business relationship: between service culture and a viable systems approach

Today business arena as well as everyday life are increasingly interconnected, highlighting the importance of relationships among people and business actors. Service culture is centred upon the valorisation of the relationship with clients and other interested parties, in the attempt to maximize overall satisfaction, and complex service systems represent an emerging model for business experiences and competition, strengthening inter-firms relationships for competitive advantage and long run survival. The Viable Systems Approach (VSA) is a theoretical proposal centred upon relational harmonization among systemic actors. Purpose of this contribute is hence to deepen business relationships, trying to analyze how to direct and manage them promoting diffuse value creation and competitiveness. The paper start to propose the main scientific proposal of the Viable Systems Approach and of system thinking, which comes 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, while the relationships between the parts themselves and the events they produce through their interaction, become more important, seeing that “system elements are rationally connected”. The work then deepens the specific contributes of VSA to inter-firms relationships within networked contexts and environmental relationships, showing its interesting proposals and how much these are coherent with recent service research theories.