The strong linkage between the creation of value and the actors’ resource-integrating efforts forces academics and practitioners to understand how value stems from resource integration (RI). This article analyses RI as an embedded process within the wider process of interactive value formation. The study is conceptual in nature and adopts a qualitative research approach and an empirical contextualization strategy. It provides a granular perspective on RI and proposes a framework that depicts RI as a process that shapes and results from a complex service context through a sequence of three phases: matching, resourcing and valuing. The article, particularly the suggested new framework, contributes to the extant literature on RI in service research; it reconceptualizes RI as process per se that is embedded in actors’ value co-creation efforts and offers the opportunity to reflect on this process as a fundamental enabler in value-creating service ecosystems.

While previous critical marketing research on co-creation has focused on how consumers’ cognitive and social abilities are governed, this article focuses on how firms’ marketing strategies attempt to govern every aspect of consumers’ lives. By drawing on a biopolitical framework and a study of Nike+, a marketing system for runners which Nike has developed around its self-tracking devices, three biopolitical marketing dimensions were identified: the gamification of the running experience, the transformation of running into a competitive activity and the conversion of running into a social activity. In identifying these marketing dimensions, the study demonstrates how self-tracking affordances are deployed in the development of a biopolitical marketing environment that tames, captures and appropriates value from different aspects of consumers’ lives, including – and combining – their social behaviours, cognitive capacities and bodily conducts. This article contributes to critical studies of value co-creation by focusing on the tamed self-tracking body as a resource for value creation, but also by demonstrating that consumers engage, through cognitive labour, in the production of the biopolitical environment that leads to their exploitation.

Through collaborative marketing approaches, companies invite consumers to provide unpaid contributions. Companies commonly do this in the realm of brand communities. The key question this article addresses is how can a company lead consumers to offer unpaid contributions to brands as an act of free will? To answer this question, we develop a framework based on volunteer commitment research to study the actions a company takes to engage consumers in unpaid work for brands. We use this framework to analyse the online collaboration promoted by the carmaker Fiat with its brand community of Alfa Romeo enthusiasts (Alfisti). The research introduces the notion of brand volunteers, that is, brand enthusiasts who are committed to providing unpaid work for the exclusive benefit of the brand. With this notion, the article discusses the possibility of exploiting consumers in value co-creation and the existence of compromises, signifying an agreement between two collaborating parties in which one party (in our case, the consumer) temporarily puts aside possible sources of conflict.

This article conceptualises how professionals, working according to customer involvement rationales in marketing contexts, experience and deal with the tension between their own identity, as regards having knowledge expertise, and the knowledge expertise they attribute to their customers. By relating the literature on professional identity to customer involvement in marketing, and by investigating this relationship in an empirical study of healthcare professionals influenced by customer involvement discourses, the article identifies the key underlying theoretical properties and mechanisms of professional reflexivity. A conceptual framework is outlined, displaying the key role of situated reflexivity by which means professionals enact ways of involving their customers, amidst a two-dimensional space defined by perceived professional and customer identities. It is argued that this conceptual framework details a social tension, between professionals and customers, that is highly visible in many service and marketing interactions and overlooked in marketing theory. It is argued that uncovering this tension adds to our understanding of why value is not always co-created in line with customer involvement rationales.

Much current research fails to provide in-depth explanations as to how and with what resources frontline employees deal with incidents where customers display dysfunctional behaviour. By drawing on theory of implicit knowledge and practical judgement this paper aims to explain this and conceptualize inherent structures and sub-mechanisms, central to service marketing. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews and narratives from four different industries, each representing service provision wherein customer misbehaviour is found to be frequent. The results display linkages between the central dimensions of dealing with customer misbehaviour. When incidents of misbehaviour occur they are met by tactics ranging from routinized action to more analytical and strategic approaches. These tactics are guided by underlying mechanisms in the form of practical judgements based on rules, balanced adjustment or reflection, with the judgements in turn being informed by implicit knowledge based on norms, schemes, or multi-perspective thinking. The study reveals patterns of linkages between these.

Drawing on an empirical study of public transport, this paper studies interactive value formation at the provider—customer interface, from a practice—theory perspective. In contrast to the bulk of previous research, it argues that interactive value formation is not only associated with value co-creation but also with value co-destruction. In addition, the paper also identifies five interaction value practices — informing, greeting, delivering, charging, and helping — and theorizes how interactive value formation takes place as well as how value is intersubjectively assessed by actors at the provider—customer interface. Furthermore, the paper also distinguishes between four types of interactive value formation praxis corresponding with four subject positions which practitioners step into when engaging in interactive value formation.

The aim of this conceptual article is to both provide a critical review of research into value co-destruction (VCD) and outline a common conceptual framework in order to better understand and guide future research into VCD and value co-creation (VCC). This review finds that the VCD stream of research has followed two lines of enquiry: one that highlights the role of resources and service systems and another that focuses on practices. It further finds that some prior research has argued that a direct and reciprocal relationship exists between VCD and VCC, captured in the concept of interactive value formation (IVF). A synthesizing IVF framework is outlined which suggests that the alignment and misalignment both within practices and in-between different practices determines IVF, that is, VCD and VCC. The framework further suggests that IVF is both enabled and constrained by resources and service systems.

Resource integration has become an important concept in marketing literature. However, little is known about the systemic nature of resource integration and the ways the activities of resource integrators are coordinated and adjusted to each other. Therefore, we claim that institutions are the coordinating link that have impact on value cocreation efforts and are the reference base for customers’ value assessment. When conceptualizing the systemic nature of resource integration, we include the regulative, normative, and cognitive institutions and institutional logics. This article provides a framework and a structure for identifying and analyzing the influence of institutional logics on resource integration in service systems.                  

Resource integration is vital to value co-creation. However, most research focuses on competencies as enablers of resource integration and the social aspects that guide them. Based on a literature review of resource integration and motivation theories, this article proposes including motivation as a driver of resource integration and integrating concepts from motivation theories into the resource integration process. This approach extends the understanding and conceptualization of actors’ resource integration processes, such that motivation determines the direction, intensity, and persistence of effort. When they engage in behavioral and cognitive activities, actors interact with resources, which informs the actors and influences their competences and motivation. Accordingly, motivation is central for a clear understanding of the psychological mechanisms of resource integration processes, as motivation expands the explanatory power of sociological factors by including intensity and persistence.

This paper critically examines consumer violations of employees in the Nordic retail sector. In bringing these violations to light, we analyse how employees become subjectified by the ideals of consumer sovereignty, and how service work is discursively and practically aligned with the notion of the sovereign consumer. We demonstrate how the discourse of consumer sovereignty intersects with gendered service work and the expectations of feminine sexual availability, and how this alignment reproduces gender and power inequalities. Drawing on studies of consumer violence and misbehaviour and feminist research on service work, we argue that the patterns of subjugation and consumer abuse are intrinsically embedded both in the ideal of consumer sovereignty itself and in the strategies that employees use to constitute themselves within prevailing market and gender orders. The study provides a critical understanding of how consumer sovereignty operates in tandem with gender structures to form subjugating practices that both enable and normalise consumer violations.

The rise and development of markets under neoliberal consumerism represents a topical theme in marketing theory and is at the heart of emergent discussions on market system dynamics. While the nonprofit market sector represents a major part of the economy and is an important locus for alternative market discourses, prior studies tend to focus on well-represented groups of actors, such as corporations or consumers. Moving beyond the dyad of producers and consumers, the present study contributes to recent discussions on institutional work by examining and pro- blematizing the role of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) as agents of market system dynamics. A qualitative discourse analysis of nonprofit marketing, conducted at one of Sweden’s largest NPOs, reveals the institutional work aimed at modifying the market for health and fitness according to alternative cultural values of, for instance, inclusiveness, democracy, and collectiveness. In par- ticular, the article draws attention to ethical institutional work in markets, which enables orga- nizations to strategically switch managerial focus between disparate institutional demands for purposes of creating and maintaining hybrid forms of legitimacy. However, ethical work also problematically entwines nonprofit with commercial values of profit maximization. The study thus contends that nonprofit consumerism may paradoxically work as a force of commercialization and market diffusion in society at large.

Authenticity has often been considered to be a key theme in contemporary consumer culture. One of its manifestations is how branded market offerings can maintain authentic meanings, especially in a market increasingly saturated with counterfeit substitutes. By following a Baudrillardian perspective, we focus on fashion objects in the "branded luxury" category to problematize the sanctity of the authentic/counterfeit distinction. We argue that marketing literature generally attempts to normatively maintain and impose the distinction in ways that obscure the complexities of this conceptual interplay. We posit that instead of normative accounts that attempt to sanctify the extant orders of global capitalist markets, literature on luxury consumption should instead recognize the excess of meaning in the semiotic interplay of commodified authentic/counterfeit meanings. Any view of morality in luxury consumption should thus recognize "ambivalence" and "seduction" as its intensive qualities.

Resources are central to value creation processes. Hence, marketing and service research rely heavily on conceptualisations of resources and resource integration for theory building efforts. One of the most widely accepted marketing lenses on resources and resource integration is the service-dominant (S-D) logic. Depicting resources as becoming and contextual, S-D logic argues that their usefulness co-depends on other resources. Some assumptions of S-D logic have been challenged particularly its dichotomous categorisation of operand and operant resources. To inform ongoing S-D logic theorising, our article problematises the multiple and contradictory ontological views upon resources and resource integration present within S-D logic. Moving beyond critique, we propose concrete means for reconciling these contradictions. Seeing a parallel between S-D logic's ontological inconsistencies and past ontological disagreements in the philosophy of science, we draw on the philosophical perspective of Karen Barad to develop a consistent onto-epistemological foundation for conceptualising the becoming nature of resources in S-D logic. The theory adaptation we perform enhances the applicability and explanatory capacity of S-D logic, while also offering a more robust and rigorous foundation for marketing and service research at large and giving managers new means to make sense of co-dependent resource phenomena.

Drawing on the theory of strategic action fields, this article explores a collective–conflictual perspective on value co-creation. Following recent developments and calls for research with a holistic outlook, we review streams of research that discuss both collective and discordant elements in social relations and subsequently relate this to value co-creation. We outline a conceptual framework for value co-creation, focusing on collective action that includes various actors, interactions, practices, and outcomes. This article pioneers the underdeveloped collective–conflictual perspective on value co-creation. Our framework enables empirical research in value co-creation that accounts for multiple actors nested in fields of collective action.

This paper draws on practice theory and a review of practice theoretical studies in marketing, management, consumer, and markets research to advance our knowledge of marketing as a value-creating activity within firms. Building on previous research, the paper contributes to the literature by advancing a Marketing-as-Practice (MAP) framework based on three key concepts: marketing practices, marketing practitioners, and marketing praxis. The structures and interrelationships between these key concepts are also outlined. The framework can be used to study value-creating marketing activities within firms as well as between firms and their stakeholders which is in line with the American Marketing Association's definition of marketing. This paper also contributes by presenting a MAP research agenda to guide future research on value-creating marketing activity.

This article outlines a framework of the transformation from the goods-dominant (G-D) to the service-dominant (S-D) logic in firms based on a case study of a bank. Drawing from institutional logic and practice theory, the article also contributes by discussing how the transformation from the G-D to the S-D logic takes place by means of the enactment of value creation practices and how such transformations are driven by institutional entrepreneurs and by conflicts between institutional logics. In addition, the article argues that the studied transformation is interwoven with changes in the professional identities of employees. Managerial implications

include how managers may draw on the presented framework to transform their firm and its

employees.