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This investigation argues that authenticity is inherently a macromarketing concept that is linked to how marketers and consumers view themselves and their own status in society. We show that authenticity refers to the marketer's marketplace condition (mindset) that can be best described as sincere concern for another. We argue that micromarketing as a general phenomenon is rooted in inauthenticity due to the fact that micromarketing practices represent (distressed, decomposed) overreaction to the marketers' self-embraced narrow view of their own social status (as maximiser of self-interest, profit, growth) that is largely irrelevant - even contradictory - to the crucial goals of society. © The Author(s) 2013.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to present a framework – the Relationality Framework – for elaborating relational behaviour, in response to calls to address the ontological weaknesses identified in the extant value and value creation literature.Design/methodology/approach– The social philosophical understanding of interaction as an organic mode of social organisation, upon which the Relationality Framework is based, supersedes the economistic (mechanistic) understanding of interaction as a means of connecting otherwise independent actors. In foregrounding the relationality of interaction, the authors are inspired by Grönroos and Voima’s (2013) conceptualisation of spheres of value generation to conceptualise the intersubjective dynamics and domains invoked in direct interaction.Findings– The Relationality Framework identifies distinct relational concepts that build on service logic’s specificity and conceptualisation at the level of direct interactions between service providers and customers. In particular, this paper develops the concept of “relationality” using the three domains in any interaction of I, Other and We.Originality/value– The Relationality Framework provides sound conceptual support for extending the theoretical and practical analysis of the value creation processes of the customer and of the firm and for the purposeful management of relationships to enhance value creation by both.

Resource integration, as it relates to value creation, has recently been a key aspect of the discussions about service-dominant (S-D) logic. However, the majority of research pays relatively little explicit attention to the process of theorizing and the epistomological and ontological assumptions upon which the theorizing process is based. This article addresses these issues. The processes that relate to theorizing and developing strong theory are discussed. We then examine how to conceptualize ‘resources’ and ‘resource integration’ following differing ontological and epistemological assumptions that guide the theorizing process. Research recommendations to help navigate through the finer details underlying the theorizing process and to advance a general theory of resource integration are developed.

How can the positive power of a marketing ethos and techniques solve social problems? We propose a deepened understanding of social marketing in response to the sustainability imperative, applying systems theory to elaborate the impact of social marketing campaigns and to advance our understanding of viable practices. A meta-framework reveals the complexities of human behaviour that influences the aims and outcomes of social marketing. We clarify the ontological status of the social marketing field and recognise the world view within which marketing has expanded into the public realm of social problems. We identify the problem of ontological misconception stemming from the denial of nonrational forms of human behaviour. While complicated mechanism is assumed in the problem of long-term health and prosperity for citizens and society, organic complexity is the condition faced. Conventional social marketing has provided a ‘partial’ gesture towards a solution. We outline an alternative understanding grounded in a human-centred world view of socio-economic advancement.

“New science” has profound implications for business. Industrial capitalism can no longer power prosperity. The mass society worldview is giving way to individualisation. The “standard enterprise logic” is challenged. Marketing has operated as an attention technology for sellers competing to capture customers. However, in an intention economy buyers are a scarce commodity, and it is intentions that drive production for specific needs. Change in marketing is overdue. Despite increased social disharmony and the mounting evidence of looming environmental disasters, progress is stagnant, often negative, as marketing exacerbates the problem by misallocating negative value goods. The commonality in the contemporary crises of financial meltdown, human-made climate change, economic inequality, distrust of government, and the social corrosion of consumerism is the moral limits of markets in civic society. Sustainable living provides the higher purpose of marketing: well-being and human flourishing. Sustainability is a socio-cultural, inherently ethical, respectful, intellectual construct for a life of careful and equitable resource use within limits and inter-dependencies. It is not the antithesis of competitive business, indeed business can flourish by competing on, and being rewarded for, the accomplishment of enduringly valuable outcomes. Sustainability is a transcendent societal “mega”-megatrend.

To explain inconsistent behaviour that is well documented in green-marketing and consumption, the authors develop the (neo)structuralist model of meaning co-creation that is based on the signifying practices of hybrid car manufacturers and consumers. The model reveals that market agents are recruited into a symbolic order that requires the perpetual reinforcement of self-opposing meanings as a condition for signification. The main problem of green practice is not the issue of market agents' authenticity/hypocrisy. Rather it represents a more interactive phenomenon – the common structure of meaning-creation – which silences important transformative action choices and thus defeats its own purpose.

PurposeThe authors aim to review a five‐year multi‐study research programme on the role of public dialogue in the social and cultural sustainability of biotechnology developments in New Zealand.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a critical review of all the published research products from a five‐year government‐funded study of the cultural and social aspects of sustainable biotechnology in New Zealand.FindingsThe review research highlights how New Zealand Government policies on biotechnology, which motivated the research programme, were fore‐grounded on economic progress and competitive positioning. Thus, debate on sustainable biotechnology issues became cast in economic and technical terms, while public dialogue became seen as diversionary and unsubstantiated. The analysis concludes that the programme was ineffective in influencing government policy and fell victim to the very problem of science governance that its purpose was designed to address.Research limitations/implicationsThe research develops implications regarding the ability of government‐funded sustainability research to influence policy.Originality/valueThe review focuses on the purpose, content, outcomes, and context of the research programme and identifies a number of key themes that arose from the programme that are useful for other sustainability policy researchers. The reviewers conclude that this case demonstrates that the marketization of the public sphere depoliticises the social and cultural construction of the nation's future.

The article explores the different aspects of the symbolism of marketing systems. The authors argue that marketing systems maintain distinctive symbolic structures in addition to their functional/operational structures; the environment is an inherent part of the system rather than being outside the system; and symbolic unfolding, that is, the process through which emerging systems address the symbolic controversies of existing systems, underlies the formation of new marketing subsystems. Two implications for macromarketing research are drawn (1) improving the standards of living via making product assortments (that are also symbolic) available to consumers in fact is an unending quest of addressing acute societal problems and contradictions and (2) the design of marketing systems is likely to fail if the symbolic character of a system under development is not taken into account. © The Author(s) 2011.

We enlist marketplace wisdom as a next characteristic of the progress towards a post-industrial marketing system. Marketplace wisdom is manifested in the development and application of oppositional values, beliefs, and differing cultures pertaining to the marketing system in its long-term development. In this regard, the phylogeny and ontogeny of marketplace wisdom is distinguished. Phylogeny tracks the origins of wisdom in the long-term quest for survival, whereas its ontogeny is manifest in the marketing system's four post-industrial qualities: comprehensiveness, interactivity, value, and impact.

This article examines the principles and practices of the marketing system within corporate social responsibility and sustainable development frameworks to argue that responsible marketing and sustainable marketing are not synonymous ideas. The article identifies misleading assumptions about progress through economic growth and preference satisfaction and highlights the issues to be confronted by marketers to fully address the social and ecological crisis of destructive overconsumption. The basic rationale for the developmental welfare marketing course of action is outlined, and this systemic policy is distinguished from the conventional appropriative form of managerial marketing. A radical new logic for marketing as a social process requiring thinking beyond the discipline is called for. The result of this review is an agenda for a sustainable society purpose and form for marketing, part of a catalytic movement, outlined in an emergent set of transdisciplinary propositions that reflect disillusionment with current values and beliefs.

PurposeRational modes of decision‐making, followed by communication of the decision to stakeholders, leading to implementation of the decision is taken as a given in most management theories. The role of corporate communication managers in many cases is to support this process via standard communication tools. This study aims to challenge the efficacy of this model by drawing on discourse and strategy‐as‐practice perspectives in order to explain the link between managed communication and performance in terms of enacting decisions.Design/methodology/approachFollowing an ethnographic case study approach, the research analyses communication discourse at Intech, a major international conglomerate based in Germany. Data was collected over a period of 15 months, structured and thematic analysis conducted, supported by ATLAS.ti computer‐aided qualitative data analysis software. Methods of discourse analysis were applied in order to explain concrete practices.FindingsA key contribution is to provide a framework that enables researchers and practitioners to understand in‐depth the setting in which decision‐related communication takes place, as recently demanded by Suchan and Charles (2006). Three critical fields of action for effective communication and strategy implementation are identified: giving decisions voice; facilitating the legitimisation process for decisions; and developing alternatives to cascading as a mode of decision implementation.Research implications/limitationsResearchers may adopt the alternative view of corporate communication proposed and test or apply it in further case studies or in more large‐scale, perhaps quantitatively oriented research projects across companies and cultural boundaries.Practical implicationsFor practitioners, a key challenge lies in implementing modes of legitimisation into managed communication.Originality/valueThis paper makes the case for an alternative approach to enacting decisions via practices of managed communication, based on the insights gained from the Intech case.

According to Vargo and Lusch (Journal of Marketing, 68:1–17, 2004a, Journal of Service Research, 6:324–335, b), service is the appropriate logic for marketing. For them, service is an interactive process of “doing something for someone” that is valued. More radically, goods also render service and have value-in-use. In this context service becomes the unifying purpose of any business relationship. This marketing world-view involves broadening and reframing what by convention counts as service and stands in opposition to 200 years of mainstream economic logic in explaining productive capacity. In our view they have succeeded in applying their scholarly thinking to old themes with synergistic results. Their thesis challenges marketing orthodoxy, and will in our view support much future innovation in both theoretical and practical terms.

This article elaborates and extends the Vargo and Lusch (2004a) service-dominant (S-D) logic thesis. Three linked exchange-enablers and their potential for improving value-in-use are discussed: first, relationships to give structural support for the creation and application of knowledge resources (relating); second, communicative interaction to develop these relationships (communicating); and third, the knowledge needed to improve the customer's service experience (knowing). These activities are integrated within an augmented S-D exchange model, and the implications for co-creating value are discussed. Finally, the argument is put that a customer's value-in-use begins with the enactment of value propositions, and the development of reciprocal value propositions is discussed in the context of the notion of sustainable betterment.

Varey, Richard J.; Baxter, Roger; Brodie, Roderick J.; Brookes, Richard W.; Plewa, Carolin; Quester, Pascale; Schembri, Sharon

The authors come not to praise marketing but to helpfully reflect, review, and re-energise. They express disquiet over flaws and limitations in the mainstream popular body of marketing knowledge th...

The great accomplishment of the past 300 years has been the building of a pervasive classical science and derivates, including economics. Yet we are resolutely acknowledging that continued unreflective employment of this worldview is now getting us deeper into trouble. We need a pragmatic (practical, sensible) alternative – we can find it through Pragmatism.

This paper reflects on the managerialistic orthodoxy of knowledge management in order to show that a critical communications theory is required for addressing real political and ethical shortcomings. This produces an alternative methodological perspective through an intentional synthesis of established methodological views. The paper's allies in this critical quest include Jürgen Habermas, Werner Ulrich, Stanley Deetz, Geoffrey Vickers, Peter Checkland and their mentors. Information systems and knowledge systems architects and engineers and their manager clients conveniently ignore fundamental issues, including politics, power, knowledge and communication. Yet, today the more substantive issues are not technical but ethical. In raising questions about the rhetoric of knowledge management reflections on the instrumentality of much of what is said and done about management and information systems are outlined. The departure point is critical scepticism. This is motivated by concerns for the ethical status of the commercially valuable outcome of (at least) two conjoined simplistic and fundamentally dominatory conventional wisdoms. These stem from two fields that are managerialistically biased and which share a common basis in a false rationality.

Management literature is critically examined, and this finds an outmoded conception of human communication that is convenient when power is the central concern, but dysfunctional when constructive decision making is needed. Communication is widely taken to be the transmission of information and the reproduction of intended meanings. This view is premised on ancient classical assumptions of causality and linearity — of absolute and classifying categories, instead of relative and relational categories. Such a basis introduces intentions and causality into our understanding of communication. This reductionist thinking is seen vividly in stimulus‐response models of human influence that do not adequately explain human interaction. The critique examines social constructionist thinking that sees the world as a complex set of interrelated social phenomena constructed by people in interaction, ie in joint social action. A wealth of constructive thinking is discovered in Nordic, Germanic and Eastern sociologies and social philosophies. This is an alternative to the Western psychological perspective that is dominant and misleading in management thinking. Circular (transactional), rather than linear, models are more helpful in understanding human communication and what is required for responsive and responsible management of communication for productive business enterprise. Causal assumptions can be discarded in taking a view of communication in and of corporations (ie ‘corporative communication’) as both stimulator and stabiliser. Social, political and cultural phenomena can be more richly understood, however, if their linguistic and discursive (interactive) nature is addressed with a constructionist perspective on social reality. Communication cannot be understood without reference to knowledge, understanding, information, meaning and sense. A social constructionist theory of communication is a widened framework for the analysis of communication in a complex and holistic fashion.

Describes how, in response to the major changes in the operating environment for a higher education institution, an approach to teamworking was piloted and facilitated by one of the authors. Describes the approach taken and highlights some of the issues raised in the programme, with explanations. Discusses lessons learned from the initiative.

Canadian-born Herbert Marshall McLuhan once was described as a contemporary Aristotle and was even declared a "national resource" in Canada. In 1967, everyone, it seemed, wanted McLuhan to speak to them during the "Year of McLuhan" (Gordon 1997, p. 226). Yet, how much do marketing specialists know of his work today? Marshall McLuhan's considerable body of work-a real intellectual treasure-sadly is hidden from most marketing scholars. The purpose of this review is to help marketing scholars rediscover McLuhan. Why review McLuhan's work at this late date? Simple; many of his ideas ring more true today than they did when he first wrote them. It also may come as something of a surprise that McLuhan had so much to say about marketing and that his work challenges many areas of received marketing wisdom. The once-enormously popular English professor pictured himself as a blind man tapping his cane in all directions to discover the nature of the media environment. He wanted everyone who would listen to understand that the new electronic media had radically altered the way people think, feel, and act. Above all, McLuhan wanted people to understand that electronic media had changed the world forever. After lying largely dormant for almost 30 years, McLuhan is being brought back into intellectual currency because he studied the very subjects that so interest educators, managers, technologists, and other members of society today. In the wake of globalization, postmodernism, deconstructionism, and other intellectual movements, McLuhan no longer seems as eccentric as he once did (Benedetti and

This is a saga of communication media inventions and their unforeseen consequences, with more than a few surprises. Asimov, Hitler, Aristophanes, and Clinton are just a few characters who make appearances, as do HAL (from 2001: A Space Odyssey), Freud, and Frankenstein. In the footsteps of Marshall McLuhan, Levinson presents his own assessment of the human ecology of communication and the effects of communication media.