Correspondence: Pierre Berthon, Bentley College, 175 Forest Street, Waltham, MA 02452, USA. Tel: +1 781 8913189; Fax: +1 781 7886456; E-mail: pberthon@bentley.edu

¹is the Clifford F. Youse Chair of Marketing at Bentley College. Professor Berthon's teaching and research focuses on electronic commerce, marketing information processing, organization and strategy, and management decision making. He has written over 90 academic papers. A number of his papers have won awards in the US and in the UK.

²is Professor of Marketing in the Segal Graduate School of Business, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, and Senior Research Fellow at the Leeds University Business School, Leeds, United Kingdom. His work has appeared in journals such as California Management Review, Sloan Management Review and MIS Quarterly, in which he also served as Associate Editor.

³is Senior Lecturer in Marketing in the department of marketing, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. His research and teaching have focused on services and e-business, and his work has appeared in such journals as the European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Ethics,and the Journal of Managerial Psychology.

⁴is Professor and Chairman of the Division of Industrial Marketing and e-Commerce at Lulea University of Technology in Sweden. He is currently researching on international organisational buying behaviour, marketing research and the marketing of small and medium-sized enterprises.

⁵is Assistant Professor in the Division of Industrial Marketing and e-Commerce at Lulea University of Technology in Sweden. Her PhD in e-Commerce assessed performance within business-to-business e-marketplaces.

Received 28 March 2008; Revised 28 March 2008; Published online 13 May 2008.

Abstract

This paper serves to specify and ground research into interfunctional integration in a wider theoretical context with particular reference to the interaction between technology and marketing in the biotechnology sphere. The general and specific problem areas are specified as those of interfunctional relations and the dyadic relationship between marketing and biotechnical managerial functions in particular. The contextual/organisational generative mechanisms that are likely to keep interfunctional relations at the centre of scholarly attention for some time are explored from the perspective of cybernetic theory. The law of requisite variety states that in an effective open system environmental variety is matched by internal structural variety. As organisations are faced with ever more turbulent, and complex environments, this must be matched by an increased internal complexity within the organisation. The two modes of response, namely holographic and mechanistic, both highlight the need to further our understanding of interfunctional differences. Having established the problem and its genesis, a specific research agenda is outlined as the exploration of the interfunctional differences from a decision-making perspective.