Few recent topics in marketing have met such immediate popularity and critique as Vargo and Lusch's service-dominant logic (SDL). While many have criticized SDL scholarship for a lack of cultural sophistication, coherence, and relevance, it has nevertheless maintained and expanded its own distinct stream of ideas. Recently, Vargo and Lusch have proposed that SDL could be extended into a theory of society. We criticize this notion by contrasting their views on commodity value with Marxist and post-Marxist literatures, finding SDL ill-equipped to understand consumer culture, but also continuing to propagate simplistic and misguided views of value in commodity markets. We conclude by challenging SDL's suitability as candidate for all-encompassing social theorizing because of its tacit neoliberalism.

This companion essay contributes to video-based organizational research by critically assessing conventional representational modes of videographic practice and conceptualizing an expressive' ontology for videographic research. We offer an image of thought that foregrounds the creative and powerfully affective potential of both videographic work and spectatorship. To advance this perspective and to inspire future research, we present our videography (length 30 minutes) that integrates various 'expressive' elements in montage form. We use the film to scrutinize the potential of video-based research and several methodological considerations tied to it. In doing so, we argue that video-based organizing of research activities can be seen as monstrous', an entire emergent mode of aesthetic storytelling that comes into being not in capturing' or recording', but rather as an affective production of potentialities.

In the light of the recent proliferation of interest in videographic methods in marketing and consumer research, we wish to make a call for thinking critically about the medium. In this article, we challenge traditional means of semiotic analysis and consider contexts outside aesthetic symbolism that take into account wider agencements of videographic inquiry. We sensitise thinking about videographic production to include a broad scope of influence beyond production and spectatorship. By positing a mode of desiring relationalities in semiocapitalist' markets, and through the illustrative example of pop-music videos, we show how videography not only produces symbols, but also has the tendency to discipline the viewer into particular subjective positions. We hope to add to the conceptual toolkit of aspiring video scholars and encourage them to be increasingly critical and reflexive about their potential impact.

The purpose of this article is to critically examine videography in the repertoire of visual approaches and delineate a positioning that would be distinctive, inspiring and daring. Notably, we advocate for alternative video-based approaches that expand the field beyond the dominant 'representational mode' by embracing the evocative power of video, and it is only in this way that videographic research could emerge into a self-standing research method without falling under other representational orders of analysis such as being read 'like text' or frozen into photographic 'stills'. In so doing, we develop an image of thought of consumer videographies, where the affective forces of video are harnessed towards 'theorizing' in an emergent rather than descriptive form.

Marketing and policy researchers aiming to increase the societal impact of their scholarship should engage directly with relevant stakeholders. For maximum societal effect, this engagement needs to occur both within the research process and throughout the complex process of knowledge transfer. The authors propose that a relational engagement approach to research impact complements and builds on traditional approaches. Traditional approaches to impact employ bibliometric measures and focus on the creation and use of journal articles by scholarly audiences, an important but incomplete part of the academic process. The authors recommend expanding the strategies and measures of impact to include process assessments for specific stakeholders across the entire course of impact, from the creation, awareness, and use of knowledge to societal impact. This relational engagement approach involves the cocreation of research with audiences beyond academia. The authors hope to begin a dialogue on the strategies researchers can use to increase the potential societal benefits of their research.

Marketing scholars with sociological and anthropological leanings have made great strides in uncovering strategic and theoretical implications of consumer collectives and consumption-driven market phenomena. It has not been very common that their perspectives have been brought to bear on retailing practice or theory. This ethnographic study examines a highly successful, globalizing, consumer-driven pop-up retail festival for its potential lessons about social movements. It reveals new insights into logics and potentialities for retailing as a field of affordances for reimagining society and social practices. It points especially to how eruptions of 'carnivalesque mood' unite everyday citizens to imagine change in a highly regulated social context and how they utilize the practice of retailing collectively to actualize societal change.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the growing marketing literature that investigates markets as “configurations”, i.e. networks of market actors engaged in market-shaping practices and performances. As this pioneering work has been largely focused on established mainstream markets and industries driven by large multi-national companies, the present article extends practice-based market theorizing to countercultural market emergence and also to unconventional market practices shaping it. 

Design/methodology/approach – Insights are drawn from a four-year multi-sited ethnographic study of a rapidly expanding electronic music scene that serves as an illustrative example of emergent countercultural market. 

Findings – In contrast to mainstream consumer or industrial markets, the authors identify a distinctive dynamic underlying market emergence. Countercultural markets as well as their appeal and longevity largely depend on an inherent authenticity paradox that focal market actors need to sustain and negotiate through ongoing market-shaping and market-restricting practices.

Practical implications – From a practitioner perspective, the authors discuss the implications for market actors wishing to build on countercultural authenticity. They highlight the fragility of countercultural markets and point out practices sustaining them, and also possibilities and challenges in tapping into them. 

Originality/value – The study contributes by theorizing the tensions that energize and drive countercultural market emergence. In particular, the authors address the important role of market-restricting practices in facilitating countercultural appeal that has not received explicit attention in prior marketing literature.

With a focus on case study research methods, this study continues the epistemological debate about qualitative research approaches in the IMP literature by reconsidering the reliance on managerial interviews as a primary empirical source in the production of knowledge claims. In this empirical approach, researchers seem to often treat the interview process and the analysis and reporting of research findings in a manner that generally gives situational credence to the veracity and factuality of the interview data. In line with several epistemological approaches that have already surfaced in IMP literature, this study further emphasizes the context-dependent, ephemeral and ultimately unstable nature of managerial “truths” imparted in the interviews. We argue that the data should be empathically and reflexively understood as the production of stories and their reporting as a form of academic storytelling of pragmatic academic and managerial value.