Per Skålén

• PhD
• Professor at Karlstads Universitet

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute knowledge regarding the nature of successful and unsuccessful value co-creation processes between firms and brand communities and the strategies used to address the latter. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on a netnographic study of the online collaborative platform known as Alfisti...

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 additi...

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 high...

In today’s complex and interconnected marketplace, the study of services and service innovation among multiple actors is an underdeveloped, but a theoretically and managerially relevant research area for enabling value cocreation. Building on general practice theory, the scarce prior service research that has drawn on practice theory, and an empiri...

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 o...

The idea of conceptualizing services as a type of discrete entity that are different from goods provided the initial conceptual foundation of service research. Today, this foundation has been denounced and replaced by the service-dominant logic (SDL), which suggests that service is a logic reffering to how resources are integrated by actors in orde...

Purpose In this study, we applied the strategy-as-practice (SAP) framework to analyse strategic communication practices. SAP implies approaching strategy as something that organisational members do and is useful for understanding the tensions between emergence and formalisation and between planning and improvisation that characterise the everyday c...

This study of domestic workers and employers examines the significance of workplace humiliation as an important yet neglected concept for organization studies. It identifies practices of symbolic, sexual, and physical workplace humiliation that shape corporeality and subjectivity in such a way that workers feel inferior, fearful, and docile. Practi...

Purpose This paper explores how actors engage in the situated learning of resource integration (RI) within value cocreation practices (VCPs). VCPs are collectively shared and organized routine activities that actors perform to cocreate value. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on a qualitative study of how successful music actors engage...

This paper focuses on how digitalisation has influenced actors’ value determination and value creation in the Swedish music market. It draws on the service-dominant logic (SDL) and the service ecosystem perspective to conceptualise value as co-created through the integration of resources by multiple actors in service exchange, enabled and constrain...

This paper contributes to business ethics by focusing on consumption that is characterized by normative violence. By drawing on the work of Judith Butler this study of kajer lok—a female subaltern group of Indian domestic service providers—and their higher status clients shows how codes of status-based consumption shaped by markets, class, caste, a...

In this study, we examine the conflicts and unintended consequences that arise from the diverse social conventions constituting a transformative service. We draw on convention theory and an ethnographic study to interpret a community-based palliative care initiative in Kerala (India) as a transformative service system. We contribute to transformati...

This paper reports on a study of value co-destruction in public services, i.e. diminishment of value by interaction between providers, users, and other actors. The goal is to contribute to the public service logic (PSL) that suggest a shift from linear co-production to dynamic value co-creation. However, PSL has devoted scant attention to value co-...

Purpose Project marketing is the specific activity of companies selling projects-to-order. Interpersonal practice is known to be important in this type of marketing. While this interpersonal practice has been little studied, some previous research suggests that changes in the institutional macro environment have affected it. Therefore, the purpose...

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 de...

This paper departs from research on Public Service Logic (PSL) to advance a framework of public service innovation (PSI) by incorporating the notions of resource integration and value proposition. The framework consists of three resource integration processes, referred to as value creation, value co-creation and value facilitation, through which us...

The present study takes issue with the uniform conceptualization of lifestyle entrepreneurs in previous research by drawing on identity theory and life-story interviews with lifestyle entrepreneurs in Norway. This article aims to show how lifestyle entrepreneurs create their entrepreneurial identity and how this identity informs both their entrepre...

Purpose This article investigates the role of frontline employees in service innovation from a service-dominant logic perspective. Frontline employees lack a formal innovation obligation. Service innovation is a resource integration process resulting in the creation of new value propositions. Design/methodology/approach A case study of service inn...

Purpose – This paper aims to study front-line employees’ contribution to service innovation, when they contribute and how they are involved in service innovation. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on a multiple-case study on service innovation in four organizations with extensive front-line employee involvement. The main data collectio...

Consumers have entered the world of contemporary organizations. They are even being reconsidered as workers. This article contributes to the body of literature on this theme by focusing on collaborative marketing, which is the organization of marketing work conducted jointly by marketing professionals and consumers. This article draws on the ethnog...

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...

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 enactmen...

This article examines the transformation of service systems through actors’ resource integration and value cocreation in contention. It is based on a netnographic study focusing on the use of information and communications technology (ICT) tools by online activists during the “Arab Spring.” The transformation of service systems is conceptualized on...

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 framew...

Exploring front-line employee contributions to service innovation Abstract Purpose – The paper studies what front-line employees contribute to service innovation, when they contribute and how they are involved in service innovation. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on a multiple-case study on service innovation in four organizations wi...

This paper presents an eight-firm study, conducted from the service-dominant logic perspective, which makes a contribution regarding knowledge of the anatomy of value propositions and service innovation. The paper suggests that value propositions are configurations of several different practices and resources. The paper finds that ten common practi...

PurposeConfessions are said to be important for members’ tribal experiences and they are usually ascribed religious meanings in existing research on consumer tribes. This suggests that confessions have a regulative role for tribal life. By employing the Foucauldian notion of pastoral power, the present study explores confession practices and examin...

In this article, we analyze the managerialistic ideology of marketing theory by focusing on “customerism”—the customer-oriented managerialism that characterizes marketing. As an ideology, customerism has made it possible for marketing to discursively compete with different management fields in directing the management of organizational members. We...

This article studies the formation and regulation of individual identities among a group of people who after long periods of unemployment are put in a specialized work program for so called ‘occupationally disabled’ individuals. In contrast to its official aim to activate and rehabilitate participants back to the labour market, the study suggests t...

Purpose – The aim is to introduce a sociological perspective on resource integration and value co-creation into service research using a service systems approach. Methodology/approach – Conceptual and a case study of the service system a Telecom Equipment and Service Provider is embedded in is reported. Findings – The service practice of the servic...

This article adopts the concept of neoliberal governmentality to critically analyze public policy failures in a bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) marketing initiative. This research shows that e-Choupal, an Indian BOP initiative, is hampered by a divide between poverty alleviation and profit seeking, which is inadequately reconciled by the neoliberal gov...

It is commonly argued that, in order to meet increasing competition, public transport organizations and systems need to be market oriented. Even though the notion of market orientationhas not been explicitly addressed in public transport research, studies relevant to market orientation have been conducted. The aim of this paper is to introduce the...

Using an interpretive case study in a business school in India, this research examines student behaviour and offers an understanding of a marketisation process in higher education. The study deploys Foucault's conceptualisation of governmentality and uncovers processes through which market subjectivity is fostered among students as they strive to b...

Purpose – Service marketing research has developed practices for managing and controlling the human resources. However, the role of these control practices in organizations has neither been empirically studied in a systematic way nor been analyzed in relation to control theory. This paper seeks to address these gaps in previous research. Design/me...

Summary This paper introduces the marketing-as-practice (MAP) special issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Management. It outlines the editors' position, suggesting that there is a need for a stronger focus on MAP in marketing which engages with critical perspectives and opens up a mutually enriching dialogue between MAP and the more established st...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to understanding of how a service-dominant (S-D) professional identity can be established among the employees of an organisation that wishes to inculcate the tenets of S-D logic. Design/methodology/approach – The paper reports a case study of a large Swedish public sector organisation in which th...

Purpose – This paper aims to introduce to marketing a discourse analytical framework on which future qualitative marketing research can draw. Design/methodology/approach – The methodology is to utilize Michel Foucault's works and the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Findings – A discourse analytical framework for qualitative...

The present paper focuses on how and to what extent service marketing practices contribute toward customer-orienting employee subjectivity. It reports a case study of a service firm – the FI – which has been drawing on service marketing practices in order to manage the organisation. By analysing the case of the FI, based on Foucault's notions of di...

Based on a conceptual analysis of marketing texts, particularly service marketing texts, and a case study of a service firm that utilizes approaches to managing organizations that have been developed within the boundaries of marketing, this book presents a critical examination of marketing as a managerial practice. Skålén focuses in particular on t...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review selected literature on e‐government service orientation and highlight differences between academic theory and empirical findings. To date, there has been little support for predictions made in the e‐government conceptual literature. Design/methodology/approach The paper is a conceptual framework for a...

The marketing discipline has been dominated by managerial research that has never really been counterbalanced by a systematic critical analysis which is problematic given the assumed legitimization of the managerialism that has ensued. This book is an attempt to rest the balance, articulating a social critique and evaluation of marketing. The book...

Most contemporary total quality management (TQM) practice is influenced, directly or indirectly, by structured, acontextual and standardized quality models. The present paper focuses on the strategic introduction of one such model, namely the Swedish Institute for Quality (SIQ) model for performance excellence, in a Swedish public-sector organizati...

Purpose Marketing “from the intra‐organizational perspective” has been comparatively untouched by the critical turn in organization studies. The objective of the present paper is to contribute to a critical examination of marketing as a change discourse by focusing on service management scholarship. In particular, the paper focuses upon the gap‐mod...

This paper provides a reading of mainstream academic marketing discourse based upon Foucault's concept of governmentality. Three periods of marketing thought are identified, described and analyzed--'early marketing thought' (c. 1900-1960), 'marketing management' (c. 1950-1985) and 'service management' (c. 1975-present). For these three periods, res...

Purpose The aim of the present paper is to study what effect CSR has had on the practice of organizations. Design/methodology/approach Since the effects of CSR on practice are an understudied topic the paper adopts a single case study design and studies Swedbank. Theoretically the paper approaches the problematic from the perspective of neo instit...

Purpose – The implications of new public management (NPM) have been studied from several theoretical perspectives. The present paper sets out to argue that there is a missing dimension to the theoretical debate regarding NPM reform – that of time and space. On the basis of two different notions of time-space logics, the present paper seeks to devel...

Purpose A fundamental aim of the service management discourse is the transformation of the culture of organisations to a culture of consistent and coherent service excellence. The aim of this paper is to analyse the possibility and plausibility of such changes. Design/methodology/approach The study draws on data from a two‐and‐a‐half‐year study of...

The principal idea of this paper is that human resource management (HRM) and quality management (QM) ideas require contextualization when used to change organizations. Here, contextualization stands for the process that leads to a shared meaning, i.e. the majority of the co-workers in an organization understand and define a concept or change in ter...

An underlying and fundamental aim of the new public management (NPM) reform program is to transform the organizational identity of public organizations into a business-like identity. In this paper the construction of organizational identity as an effect of NPM initiatives is analyzed from a sensemaking perspective. The study draws on data from a tw...

Service guarantees have been attributed the benefit of improving the overall service of a service provider. However, little research has been carried out within the area. This article focuses on one aspect of the service guarantee, the effects that service guarantees may have on service recovery. Critical incident data were collected using the crit...