The IT buying center: Integrating the buying center and IT governance

The construct of the “buying center” is arguably one of the most important concepts in the industrial-marketing literature. Despite many seminal studies, research into the buying center needs to take the many trends unfolding in the environmental context into account in order to remain relevant in the future. One particularly timely topic that has been overlooked by buying center research is IT governance. Against this backdrop, this study aims to examine how the dynamics of the buying center depends on the IT governance structure in the buying situation and the accompanying social networks. In so doing, the study contributes by: (i) cross-fertilizing the literature streams on the buying center, IT governance and social network analysis, (ii) proposing an integrative typology that provides a better understanding of the buying center from an IT-governance perspective, and (iii) outlining emerging propositions to guide future work.