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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.

This paper draws on a qualitative study of how successful music actors engage in VCPs and learn RI. Interviews and observations were used to collect data that were analyzed by drawing on the Gioia methodology.

The findings illuminate the types of VCPs actors engage in to learn RI, the ways in which actors learn RI by engaging in VCPs, and how social contexts condition actors' learning of RI.

This paper offers a framework for understanding actors' situated learning of RI by engaging in VCPs. It illuminates the VCPs that actors engage in to learn RI, how actors advance from peripheral to core participation through their learning, the ways in which actors learn RI by engaging in VCPs, and how social contexts condition actors' situated learning of RI. Implications for the scarce prior research on how actors learn RI are presented.

To contribute to innovative solutions and sustainable growth, managers and policymakers need to offer actors opportunities to learn and make space for actors with competencies that may be important and needed in future VCPs.

In focusing on how actors learn RI by engaging in VCPs, this study draws on theories of communities of practices and situated learning, as well as practice theoretical service research.

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 communication work of communication practitioners.

The paper is based on an ethnographic study of a record company and on qualitative interviews with various actors from the music industry.

Tensions exist between the emergence of inputs from active consumers that require flexibility and attempts to strategically formalise and continuously adapt plans and encourage consumers to act in anticipated ways. The findings revealed five strategic communication practices—meetings, working in the office, gathering and analysing consumer engagement and related data, collaboration and storytelling—that practitioners used to conduct strategic communication and navigate the tensions.

The study contributes to understanding the role of strategic communication practices in contemporary organisations and how practitioners manage the tensions within them. The study shows that an SAP approach can account for improvisation and emergence, as well as planning and formalisation. It also shows how SAP resonates with emergent and agile strategic communication frameworks.

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 of this paper is to study today’s interpersonal practice in project business and how the institutional environment conditions it.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with marketing managers at project-based firms in different business sectors in France and Sweden. Data collection and analysis was informed by grounded theory.

The paper identifies three types of interpersonal practice in project marketing, referred to as the transactional, the work-based and the socializing. Changes in these are explained in relation to the three institutional logics identified in the data: the market institutional logic of business ethics, the corporate institutional logic of rationalization and the family institutional logic of gender equality.

Future studies can continue and broaden this work as it regards how the institutional conditioning of interpersonal practice varies with context.

By clearly categorizing the three types of interpersonal practice and their relative role today, companies can orient the activities of salespeople, business developers and other project marketers.

The paper highlights how business ethics and gender equality have changed interpersonal practices in project marketing.

The paper contributes to the current debate on project marketing by identifying three types of interpersonal practice and by illustrating how institutional logics condition and change these. The paper shows that extra-business activities are needed less than previous research has argued with regard to maintaining customer relationships in-between projects.

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.

The paper draws on a netnographic study of the online collaborative platform known as Alfisti.com, which carmaker Alfa Romeo launched to enhance co-creation with its most devoted consumers, the “Alfisti”.

The findings identify three groups of collaborative practices: interacting, identity and organizing practices. The paper details how firm and brand community members enact the elements – procedures, understandings and engagements – of collaborative practices and how the alignment of these enactments impacts value co-creation.

The paper suggests that co-creation of value succeeds when the enactment of collaborative practices aligns, i.e. when firm and brand community members enact practices in a similar way, and that co-creation fails when the enactment of practices misaligns. Firms and brand communities use three realignment strategies – compliance, interpretation and orientation – to address the misalignment and failure of co-creation. The fact that the research draws on a single qualitative case study is a limitation.

Managerial implications include using realignment strategies to manage firm-brand community co-creation.

Creating an empirical-based framework regarding successful and failing co-creation and how the latter is addressed in the context of brand community makes the paper original.

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.

Single case study of a Swedish financial service firm referred to as the Financial Institute which has drawn on service marketing practices to manage the organization and control the employees.

The empirical findings suggest that control practices are associated with service marketing discourse controls for the customer orientation of the human resources.

In order to analyze the empirical findings the paper draws on the control theory of organization studies. More particularly labor process theory and Foucauldian organization theory (FOT) are invoked. The analysis suggests that mainly FOT explains how service marketing practices control the customer orientation of the human resources.

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.

The paper reports a case study of a large Swedish public sector organisation in which the transition to e‐government provided an opportunity to inculcate a new service‐based professional identity among employees. The main data collection method is interviewing.

The study identifies four characteristics of a S‐D professional identity: interaction; customer orientation; co‐creation; and empowerment. The study finds that such an identity can be established through five socialisation processes: collective socialisation; random socialisation; serial socialisation; investiture socialisation; and divestiture socialisation.

As with all case study research, the paper draws analytical generalisations but is unable to provide any statistical generalisations; further quantitative research is needed in this area. Moreover, the paper takes a intra‐firm perspective; future studies could approach the topic from a consumer perspective.

Managers who wish to inculcate S‐D logic in their organisations should focus on developing the interactive and co‐creation skills of their employees, as well as empowering them and providing them with an enhanced understanding of customer orientation.

The study is novel in several respects: it provides a systematic empirical analysis of how S‐D logic can be established in an organisation; the notion of a S‐D professional identity is introduced; and the theory of organisational socialisation is applied to S‐D logic research for the first time.

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.

A case study of service innovation projects that includes three different businesses in the IT sector and personal interviews with 25 frontline employees.

The findings suggest that frontline employees contribute to service innovation by test-driving potential value propositions. Three types of value proposition test-driving have been identified: cognitive, practical, and discursive. The findings suggest interdependencies between the different modes of value proposition test-driving, as well as specific phases of the service innovation process dominated by one form or another.

Value proposition test-driving offers a fruitful context for managers to involve frontline employees and use their creativity and expertise. The case study approach, however, limits the statistical generalizability of the findings.

The study is novel in that it (a) introduces the notion of value proposition test-driving for service innovation; (b) provides a systematic empirical analysis of how frontline employees contribute to service innovation by test-driving value propositions; (c) offers a service innovation model informed by the service-dominant logic; and (d) contributes to the service-dominant logic by detailing how service innovation occurs in practice.

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.

The study draws on data from a two‐and‐a‐half‐year study of the introduction of service management initiatives at the public hospital in the county of Värmland in Sweden. Interviews and participant observation are used to gather data. Sensemaking theory is adopted to evaluate the change of service culture.

It is concluded that the programme of service management reform studied here creates heterogeneous and conflicting cultures, rather than the culture of coherent and consistent service excellence that it was supposed to produce.

The study suggests that a shift in focus from “prescription” to “description” is required in research into service culture.

Service organisations are multi‐faceted – thus rendering cultural engineering ineffective. The creation of shared meaning in a common, consistent, and coherent service culture is therefore not usually possible. Managers should concentrate on understanding the culture of their organisations, rather than attempting to change that culture.

The paper investigates an attempt to create service culture. Such a study has not been undertaken in previous research.

This paper aims to study front-line employees’ contribution to service innovation, when they contribute and how they are involved in service innovation.

The paper draws on a multiple-case study on service innovation in four organizations with extensive front-line employee involvement. The main data collection methods are interviews and observations.

The paper suggests that front-line employees contribute customer knowledge, product knowledge and practice knowledge during five phases of the service innovation process – project formation, idea generation, service design, testing and implementation – and that front-line employee involvement ranges from active to passive.

Statistical generalization of the results is needed.

The paper reveals that early and active front-line employee involvement in the service innovation process creates conditions for a positive contribution to service innovation.

The paper suggests that early and active knowledge contributions by front-line employees to the service innovation process are associated with the creation of attractive value propositions.