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The category captain system (CC) of retailer category management (RCM) is established, accepted, and widely adopted. The paper empirically assesses the application of this system in building collaborations between retailers and their suppliers to generate growth following COVID-19. This study applies service-dominant logic (S-D logic) to RCM and establishes the current ‘practical’ application of the five axioms of S-D logic within the CC system.

The researchers adopted a qualitative research design which examined both category managers and retail buyers currently involved in the CC system, using thematic analysis of transcripts from 25 practitioner participants.

The study reveals service is not a fundamental basis of exchange in the CC system. Value is uniquely, independently, and separately created by the retailer that significantly restricts the scope of the category service eco systems and the opportunity to innovate through value co-creation.

Significant change is required to realise value co-creation and innovation applying S-D logic to RCM. The study indicates there is potential to start this change by the formalisation of wider informal category relationships between non-captain suppliers and retailers through consumer insight technology, and by aligning suppliers and retailers to make more effective and sustainable trading decisions.

The study indicates that certain elements of the CC system proposed by the literature's games-based theoretic models, are not applied in practice. The lived experiences of practitioners suggest informal ways of by-passing the formal system using S-D logic.

Resource integration is a central idea within service-dominant logic (S-D logic), but there has been little scholarly research on this aspect of theory. This paper aims to explore resource integration between marketing agencies and their clients.

In total, nine case studies have been developed using a dyadic approach of interviewing clients and members of their agency teams. This is followed-up with presentations and workshops with over 200 practitioners who validated the findings and added new perspectives.

The key operant resources in the client/agency context have been identified. The ways the operant resources of the actors developed during the course of resource integration, building potential resources for future co-creation are shown. The differing perspectives of the actors to each other’s contribution are highlighted.

This study suggests that resource enhancement and development, as a result of integration, is important. For agency/client research, resource integration and development brings new perspectives complementing existing relationship approaches to research. The findings have implications for relationship marketing theory across business-to-business (B2B) contexts.

The findings suggest a resource integration approach that could be jointly addressed between agency and client in improving the way they work together. The discourse of co-creation suggests a way for them to talk about how to work together effectively. Suggestions are made for teaching.

This study develops the S-D logic theory through exploring resource enhancement and development in a B2B co-creation context. The dyadic nature of the research is novel in studying how marketing agencies and clients work together and new perspectives emerge from the approach.

This study aims to validate an integrative model that investigates the structural relationships among consumer social resources (including social capital and social exchange), co-creation behaviors (as outcome of social resources) and satisfaction and positive word-of-mouth (as joint outcomes of social resources and co-creation practice).

A cross-sectional design was used to gather data from education services in HCM City, Vietnam. The whole of 334 consumer surveys were used to validate a research model using SEM/AMOS.

The paper, on the basis of service-dominant logic and from customer perspective, asserts the importance of consumer co-creation in service logic. The finding reinforces that social capital and social exchange, as interconnected operant resources, influence consumer co-creation that further affects consumer satisfaction and positive word-of-mouth. In addition, no gender gap of co-creation practice is found in education services of the study. Moreover, this study, with the support of structuration theory, posits that value is co-created and socially contextual through resource integration and service exchange.

This paper is among the first, with empirically validating the social capital-co-creation link, to reveal that social capital, as a second-order construct, is an important determinant of co-creation practice. Next, this is also one of the first studies from a consumer view, with social exchange leading social capital as empirically demonstrated, that evidently investigates both the mechanism of value co-creation and the interconnection of social resources in service systems. Last but not least, this study may be also one of the first steps toward investigating the socially contextual nature of co-creation which may assert the last updated axiom of service-dominant logic.

From a service ecosystem perspective, the purpose of this paper is to examine students’ evaluation surveys as a tool used by most higher education (HE) institutions worldwide to measure teaching quality with consequences for tenure and promotion.

This study is based on the service-dominant (S-D) logic and specifically on the service ecosystem approach. Through an in-depth literature review and analysis the authors explore the effect of student evaluation surveys on the value co-creation process, describe the role they play in the HE ecosystem and critically evaluate their efficacy. The research is based on empirical data from the literature and previous studies findings.

The literature review highlights the detrimental consequences of the use of students’ evaluation surveys for teachers and students and for the rest of actors of this service. The authors argue that institutions should embrace a service ecosystem perspective based on S-D logic. The authors highlight the role of institutions as moderators of the interactions between actors and, finally, the authors have introduced the concept of “service ecosystem pollution” which the authors define as the presence or introduction of disruptive elements in the service ecosystem adversely affecting the nature of value co-creation.

This study emphasizes the importance for HE institutions to embrace a service ecosystem approach so as to foster and preserve the value co-creation processes taking place within the interactions among the HE actors. Conclusions drawn from this paper suggest that HE institutions should focus on strategies such as investing in improving students’ and teachers’ operant resources rather than polluting the HE service ecosystem with the use of students’ evaluation surveys.

Hitherto there are no studies analyzing the tools HE institutions use to measure teaching quality from a service ecosystem perspective. The study is especially valuable due to the consequences and the use of these measures entails for teachers, students and society.

This paper aims to investigate whether and why the base of the pyramid (BOP) actors display passive innovation resistance because of which they reject service innovations without evaluation and forfeit potential to improve their well-being. The resourceness concept, referring to the outcome of how actors appraise and integrate resources in pursuit of a purpose at hand, is used as a theoretical lens to investigate the everyday consumption behaviour of BOP households and helps to investigate how and why passive innovation resistance occurs. The outcomes of the study help address important theoretical and practical considerations for the development of successful new service concepts at the BOP.

Narrative interviews with 29 households in Zambia provide data, from which patterns in how potential resources do or do not become real are identified and related to the concept of passive innovation.

Economic, social and other factors in the BOP context clearly influence non-random patterns of resource integration which are correlated with passive innovation resistance. This can lead to service innovations being ignored and/or misunderstood prior to evaluation for adoption. This is a risk to the potential positive impact of service innovation for poverty alleviation at the BOP.

Service innovation at the BOP must begin with a deep understanding of “how” and “why” consumers typically appraise and integrate potential resources to achieve a beneficial outcome in their context. To overcome the barrier of passive innovation resistance, marketing education must stimulate an understanding of potential benefits and motivation towards the change associated with the adoption of service innovation.

The findings support more successful service innovation strategies for the BOP, which can provide vital infrastructure for the alleviation of poverty.

The application of a service-dominant logic perspective in the BOP context and the conceptual linkage between resourceness and passive innovation resistance is novel. Valuable insights are gained for service practitioners at the BOP and for further conceptual development of innovation resistance in the BOP context.

The purpose of this paper is to respond to the criticism O'Shaughnessy and O'Shaughnessy made of service‐dominant logic in EJM, on behalf of both the paper and the worldwide community of scholars that have embraced S‐D logic as historically informed, integrative, transcending and rich in its potential to generate theoretical and practical contributions.

The paper is a critical, conceptual analysis of the fallacious arguments that O'Shaughnessy and O'Shaughnessy developed to argue against the emerging and rapidly developing service‐dominant logic.

The paper shows that, contrary to the claims of O'Shaughnessy and O'Shaughnessy, S‐D logic: is neither regressive nor intended to displace all other marketing perspectives; is not advocating technology at the expense of explanatory theory; and is pre‐theoretic and intended to be soundly grounded in a manner to assist theory construction.

Theory advancement is critical to marketing and S‐D logic puts special emphasis on the development of theory. It begins to do this by proposing ten foundational premises, which some may wish to refer to as axioms. From these axioms, considerable theoretical work and related empirical research can develop.

O'Shaughnessy and O'Shaughnessy wish to prevent marketing scholars from adopting, advocating, and supporting service‐dominant logic and, as they suggest, taking a backward step. They view the S‐D logic movement as primarily USA‐dominated (which it is not) and are firmly anti‐S‐D logic. The available evidence from around the world suggests that the S‐D logic movement has profound implications for the advancement of both marketing science and marketing practice.

It is critical that S‐D logic should not be viewed as being represented by a single paper but as a body of work that Lusch and Vargo have developed since their initial publication and also the work of a community of scholars working collaboratively to co‐create S‐D logic.

This paper is a rejoinder to Lusch and Vargo's defense of their service‐dominant logic paper against criticism.

The paper responds to Lusch and Vargo's defense and criticism of the initial article primarily through examining the logic of their case.

The paper finds that both the charges and the arguments against the criticism have no merit.

The paper offers guidance as to the approach needed to advance the study of service marketing. This rejects the notion that viewing all businesses as service entities is a progressive approach but recommends a disjunctive definition of service, which would throw up service‐categories that needed to be studied in their own right if progress is to be made.

The paper suggests that Lusch and Vargo's S‐D‐dominant logic is unlikely to be practically fruitful while remaining theoretically limited.

While (customer) engagement has been proposed as a volitional concept, our structuration theory/S-D logic-informed analyses of actors’ (e.g. employees’) engagement in service innovation reveal engagement as a boundedly volitional theoretical entity, which arises from actors’ structural and agency-based characteristics and constraints. In line with this observation, the purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual model of actor (i.e. customer, firm, employee) engagement with service innovation.

Based on the observed gap, the authors propose an integrative S-D logic/structuration theoretical model that outlines three particular service innovation actors’ (i.e. customers’, the firm’s and employees’) engagement, which comprises institution-driven (i.e. fixed) and agency-driven (i.e. variable) engagement facets. In addition, the authors integrate the key expected characteristics of positively (vs negatively) valenced service innovation engagement for each of these actor groups in the analyses.

The authors develop a 12-cell matrix (conceptual model) that outlines particular service innovation actors’ institution-driven and agency-driven engagement facets and outline their expected impact on actors’ ensuing positively and negatively valenced engagement.

The authors discuss key theoretical implications arising from the analyses.

Outlining service innovation actors’ structure- and agency-driven engagement facets, the authors’ model can be used to explain or predict customers’, the firm’s or employees’ service innovation engagement-based activities.

The aim of this paper is to give an empirical illustration of value co-creation and to argue for narrative methodology as a fruitful analytical strategy when exploring the processes of value co-creation.

Through an in-depth case study in the non-profit housing sector in Denmark, the research explored how residents perceive and co-create value in a long-term service relationship. The point of departure is an understanding of value co-creation as a phenomenological construct determined by the beneficiary, and the research is based primarily on the perspectives of service-dominant logic and customer-dominant logic.

The research elucidated how value is both socially created and deconstructed through stories. Moreover, narrative analysis revealed how residents’ perceptions of services are deeply embedded in context and time. In this way, the study highlighted that the co-creation of value is inherently social and temporal.

Understanding how value is perceived and negotiated by customers might assist practitioners to refine their understanding of value co-creation and lead them to address customers in more nuanced ways.

Prevailing streams in service research on value co-creation argue for more studies and empirically grounded examples of value co-creation processes, especially those based in the customer sphere. This paper contributes to such an enhanced understanding of the process of value co-creation and gives the outline of a new methodology for studies in this specific area of service research.