| Since the1980s, the revolutionary advancements of technologies have led to shorter and shorter product life-cycles, and with the maturing consumers and with the reduction of consumption transfer barrier under the market liberalization, the dynamic changes of consumer needs are becoming much more difficult to perceive and understand. This radical transformation of market competition brought by the dynamism of technology and market is wearing out firms. On the other hand, due to fierce competition, the downsizing strategies of Anglo-American firms have caused an irrecoverable loss of firms’ key knowledge assets while reducing their costs. It is against this background that these firms have seized the Customer Relation Management (CRM) to stabilize their customer relation and to extend their customer loyalty duration. But, unfortunately, the surveys from the firms have shown that, CRM has not achieved their mission to save their firms from their difficulties. With the21st century, the firms’ business environment continues to demonstrate a more dynamic and more complicated tendency.With the challenges of21st century business environment where uncertainty and complexity dominate, the firms, through reflections of the CRM, and by references of business successes in confronting the environment challenges of complexity to innovate value creation activities, are constantly revolutionizing their business thinking. The core to this drastic change of business thinking, is that knowledge is becoming, irreplaceably, a vital assent determining firms’ core competitive advantage. At the same time, the academic researchers’, empirical and field studies of knowledge economy’s influences on business value creation activities in the field have also proven the irreversibility of this tendency. Hence, in the pioneer areas of marketing practice innovation and scientific researches, the customer knowledge management (CKM), having such value creation activities as customer knowledge’s acquirement, transfer, sharing and creation, has received substantial attention and has gained higher expectations.Meanwhile, will the firms’ customer knowledge management experience the same embarrassment of the CRM?As a result, how to realize effectively the firms’ CKM, to make it a powerful tool dealing with challenges of market competition, is one of majors missions in the sphere of management sciences. Thus, it is only by way of scientific deduction or from synthesis of empirically proved experiences to explore and to find the successful strategies of CKM, that the scientific guidance for firms’ practice in this regard can be assured, or the solutions can be found, otherwise, these firms will never recover in front of the difficulties.At present, the consensus of the academic and business spheres is that, the knowledge comes from customer, from customers defined in its wide sense in the CKM.And this definition includes such external customers as consumers, alliance partners, and suppliers from both up and down stream, and such internal customers as employees, shareholders and groups with the firm. Consequently, the knowledge management (KM) of internal and external customers is highlighted as a key issue in the business operation modes and strategic thinking.By observations of the successful transforming firms (such as GE, Apple, IBM, etc.) in confronting the dynamic and complicated environment, it is clear that, these firms of remarkable market performance, especially those firms of superior marketing performance, are excellent learning examples in dealing with complicated knowledge network environment. In the positive incessant interactions with internal and external customers, by the depth and width of their relational embeddedness, these firms are realizing a knowledge network integration and development, composed by customers in the wider sense, and they are promoting effectively, through organizational learning, the extraction, integration, application and innovation of explicit and implicit knowledge, which will eventually lead to outstanding corporate CKM competence as well as performance. Thus, in regard to the business CKM system, there exists a dynamic, evolutionary influence relation among the relational embeddedness, organizational learning, and customer knowledge management performance (CKMP).For this, the core issue in this research is to explore what are the relational mechanism and optimization strategies of CKMP’s influence mechanism? To explore the problem, this thesis conducts an explorative logic deduction and empirical study from the following logical layers and relative research contents.(1) By way of logic deduction, an influence mechanism of CKMP is constructed. Resuming the theoretical evolution of customer management and the real cases of two companies’ CKM dilemma as the introduction, the thesis, by way of the mature management science paradigm of "Structure(Environment)â†'Structure(Behavior)â†'Performance (Outcome)" and by theories of SECI spiral knowledge and Ba knowledge, constructs a CKM system framework and influence mechanism model. The model signifies that, under the impact of environment dynamism, those firms will take the embedding strategy of external and internal customer knowledge network while upgrading their core knowledge assets and CKMP, and with the promotion of organizational learning conducts, will realize the acquirement, sharing, transfer and creation of customer knowledge. In this way, the theories concerned in this research include those theories of environment dynamism, relational embeddedness, organizational learning, and customer knowledge management.(2) Measurement design and scientific tests are conducted concerning the management constructs for the influence mechanism of CKMP. To deepen the research subject, the management constructs of this thesis include environment dynamism, entrepreneurial orientation, relational embeddedness, organizational learning, and customer knowledge management performance, etc. For the sake of empirical study, the thesis designs the relative measurements and undertakes relative tests for the above mentioned constructs. For the reason that the above constructs are often rooted in western management practice and management context, the measurement development and test based on Chinese firms’ practice will provide useful reference for management studies in China’s context.(3) An empirical study is realized concerning the inner influence mechanism of CKMP. Through regression method, this research investigates the influence relation, the intervening effect of organizational learning as well as adjusting effect of environment dynamism of variable dimensions for "Internal, External Relation Embeddedness(antecedent variable^Organizational Learning (intervening variable) CKMP (outcome variable)", thus demonstrates the inner influence mechanism of CKMP, providing a scientific foundation for further strategy design in regard to CKM.(4) A comparative study based on empirical tests is conducted concerning CKMP’s influence and function mechanism. Based on the CKMP’s influence mechanism model construction, and by structural equation model (SEM) tools, the research tests and compares the model’s influence mechanism. In other words, the research tests the influence mechanism of "Internal, External Relation Embeddednesâ†'Organizational Learningâ†'CKMP", compares their correlation relations, and investigates.From the sample of199firms, by model deduction and empirical analysis, and by regression analysis and SEM’s model fitting technologies, the following conclusions are made:(1) Relation Embeddedness exerts direct influences on CKMP’s improvement.(2) Organizational Learning plays a partial mediating role between External Relation Embeddedness and CKMP, and it plays a complete mediating role between Internal Relation Embeddedness and CKMP.(3) Technology Environment Dynamism positively moderate the relation between External Relation Embeddedness and CKMP, while no such moderation is found between Internal Relation Embeddedness and CKMP.(4) Through the model comparison of the effect mechanisms of Internal, External Relation Embeddedness, and CKMP, twenty one valuable conclusions are drawn in an explorative manner.In fact, a substantial amount of theoretical and empirical studies have proven that, the key to corporate successes is to establish network connections with sufficient number of "resource gateway". And the higher the heterogeneity of these networks, the higher the success rate of these firms will be. Furthermore, these firm networks will be helpful to firms’knowledge acquirement, knowledge utilization, risk investment preference and corporate business. It is especially the case under the knowledge economy condition,where firms’ daily activity and innovative conducts are always embedded in the knowledge network context, not taking place in "isolated islands". As a result, the empirical research on CKMP, based on knowledge network theories and on social capital’s relational embeddedness theories, will provide powerful investigation tools and theoretical approaches to resolve the issue of firms’performance gap. The findings of this thesis in regard to theoretical research and practical innovation are shown as the following:(1) The acquirement of customer knowledge is dependent on a network environment, that is to say, the knowledge networks of both internal and external customers. And from this judgment, this thesis takes an explorative approach of relational embeddedness in firms’ knowledge network to investigate the influence mechanism of CKMP, which provides a new approach to the furthering of CKM theories.(2) Few studies of CKMP have been realized. This thesis, based on the research paradigm of SCP (Structure-Conduct-Performance), establishes a research framework of customer knowledge network relation embeddednessâ†'organizational learning conductâ†'customer knowledge performance. And by providing empirical research results, the thesis has made useful explorations and supplementations for theoretical innovation and practical application in the field.(3) By the influence mechanism comparisons of internal, external embeddedness and CKMP, valuable opinions and suggestions can be proposed for the CKM strategy optimization as well as organizational learning improvement, offering thus worthwhile research references for business application. |
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