This article advocates recognition of interpretive elements in business research and the need for improvement of the researcher’s interpretive skills. The scientific tradition specifically concerned with interpretation is called hermeneutics. However, interpretation exists in all types of...

The purpose of this article is to draw the reader’s attention to service productivity and its connection to service quality and eventually to profits. In service operations the customer plays an active role in influencing productivity and quality. Furthermore, contemporary companies are...

Purpose – This article aims to look at the evolution of service management and marketing through three paradigms, the latest prescribing a new logic of service, to comment on a previously published article (Gummesson, 1998) on productivity, quality and relationship marketing in service...

Purpose – With Sweden and Europe and the present and the future as vantage points, the purpose of this paper is to challenge the viability of customer centricity (or customer orientation) and its axiom, the marketing concept, as the basis for marketing and profitability....

Most of a company′s marketing is not carried out by the professional full‐time marketer but by the amateur part‐time marketer (PTM), who is omnipotent both inside and outside a company. The PTM influences customer relations and revenue without belonging to the marketing or sales...

Explores the dependency between relationship marketing (RM) and new developments in organization theory. In RM, relationships, networks and interaction are in focus. The primary role of marketing is to connect suppliers and customers but RM also includes relationships with other stakeholders,...

This is a critical discourse on marketing management textbooks and their presentations of general marketing theory. These books claim to be general, complete and up‐to‐date, although the base of “textbook theory” is consumer goods mass marketing, a minority of all marketing if compared...

Develops a definition of action research that is particularly suitable for marketing and based on the articles in this issue of European Journal of Marketing , emphasising the breadth of action research in marketing and its distinctive interest in analytic generalisation, that is, in building a...

Purpose – To discuss and analyse three themes in qualitative research in marketing which are objects of both frustration and confusion: analysis and interpretation; theory generation; and a quest for scientific pluralism and individual researcher lifestyles. Design/methodology/approach –...