Data Mining In the Context of Business Network Research

In the field of information technology (IT) enabled business networks and research the traditional data mining approach is theoretically and practically inadequate for knowledge eliction and management requirements in inter-organizational collaborative business environments. The issues are mostly related to fundamentally and philosophically narrow conceptions of the meaning of information, and are grounded to the metatheoretical implications of positivistic, nomothetic and objective view of reality that restricts the feasibility of research oriented application based on them. Here a novel research framework for network-wide knowledge discovery is presented that is based on sociologically anti-positivistic, ideographic and subjective view of society construed from social facts. The theoretical framework is further developed here by synthesizing it with and extracting results from existing research models and artefacts originated in analyzing a variety of business networks (for example, a case study concentrating on modeling the IT enabled service provision of local travel industry value chain). The main contribution here is the explication and elaboration of existing and emerging business network research theories and related stakeholder-level practical considerations focusing on topics such as: multidisciplinary research conceptualizations, information asymmetry reduction by benefiting from contract law oriented functional principles, and network-wide knowledge governance approaches.