Content area
Full Text
Current status and future direction: views from global thought leaders - III
Edited by Professor Göran Svensson
The article on service-dominant logic by [46] Vargo and Lusch (2004) immediately gave rise to an international discussion of what a service perspective on business can offer marketing in general. In the following year, a survey was published of the observations of a number of leading international scholars in the service field on service and service marketing ([8] Edvardsson et al. , 2005). The key finding was that service was indeed more generally considered to be a perspective than merely an activity: "Service is a perspective on value creation rather than a category of market offerings" ([8] Edvardsson et al. , 2005, p. 118). During the 1990s and continuing into the 2000s, the issue of value creation and the locus of value creation for customers had started to gain interest in the management and the marketing literature. The prevailing view that value for customers is embedded in products that are outputs of firms' manufacturing processes, value-in-exchange, was challenged by an alternative view, viz. that value for customers emerges in the customers' sphere as value-in-use in their value-generating processes ([30] Normann and Ramirez, 1993; [53] Holbrook, 1994; [39] Ravald and Grönroos, 1996; [45] Vandermerwe, 1996; [49] Wikström, 1996; [50] Woodruff and Gardial, 1996; [29] Normann, 2001; [46] Vargo and Lusch, 2004; [14] Grönroos, 2006). According to this view, value is not created by the provider but rather in the customers' value-generating processes ([13] Grönroos, 2000). As [48] Vargo and Morgan (2005) pointed out, this is not a new approach to value creation, but in the economics and business economics literature it has long been overshadowed by the value-in-exchange notion.
In one of their original propositions about a service-dominant logic, [46], [47] Vargo and Lusch (2004, 2008) viewed customers as co-producers, but later changed this view into customers as co-creators of value. Gradually, the issue of value creation has become a central issue in the discussion of whether service as a perspective or logic can offer marketing something new. The discussion of service logic has been preoccupied with what service does for customers, and conclusions for marketing management have been drawn from this perspective. However, service as a logic is...