Search results

The competitive luxury market raises higher requirements for luxury brands to effectively involve young generations in creating and endowing meanings to products, services and experiences. Several researchers suggest that art experiences create a fertile source of co-creation practices for cultural customers as they could engage in cognitive, emotional and imaginal activities to endowing meanings to products or services. Hence, bridging art and luxury is of significance for luxury brands to create value and engage their customers. This chapter delivers the essence of value for luxury brands and their customers and focusses on how luxury brands deploy art-based initiatives as a favourable technique in which value co-creation takes place.

This chapter presents the key results of a research project that explored managing service productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa through the lens of lived experiences of bank executives employed as ‘knowledge workers’ in the Nigerian banking sector. The study adopted a qualitative phenomenological research design. Data was gathered from 16 Nigerian top bank executives purposively selected using semi-structured face-to-face interviews. Trans Positional Cognition Approach (TPCA), a new phenomenological research method, was used to analyse the data gathered. The study data analysis yielded five themes; micromanagement practices, use of dysfunctional strategies to drive service operations, deposit mobilisation target as a productivity measure, managerial indifference to potential nescience economy issues and master-servant (power culture) strategy, which epitomises fundamental managerial approaches adopted in the sector. The study identified critical service productivity management issues grounded in reality that influence the capability and potentiality of the study knowledge workers. It also contributes the novel, ‘official knowledge worker lived experience of service productivity model’ for use by decision-makers in the banking sector. Thus, it sets an agenda for these ‘knowledge workers’ line managers’ and bank regulators in the research setting. The study extended the viable system model by applying it in this phenomenological enquiry and using it to explain/deepen our understanding of the findings that emerged. The output of this work contributes to scholarly knowledge on service productivity management from the sub-Saharan African banks’ perspective. It can be generalisable in countries with similar financial and economic characteristics like the research setting.

This paper addresses the accusation that the competence perspective lacks operationalization. By evaluating the resources and competences regarded as important a categorization of capabilities is developed. Four lower-order and three higher-order capabilities are derived inductively by analyzing the firm as an open system. Using this categorization of capabilities five cases of business model transformation are analyzed. The paper also discusses the possibilities to use this categorization for prescriptive and normative purposes and presents some preliminary ideas for further research.