Collaborative theorising about markets and marketing and service-dominant logic

Abstract

Following the very successful forums on Markets and Marketing (FMM) held at the University of New South Wales in 2008 and at the University of Cambridge in 2010, the third forum was held at the University of Auckland Business School in February 2012. The purpose of the forums is to advance the development of service-dominant (S-D) logic by focusing on foundational issues related to markets and marketing and exploring the cross-disciplinary foundations of the S-D logic. Informed by S-D logic’s foundational thinking about co-creation and building on the highly interactive logics of the first forums, this forum was developed into an experiment in collaboration with academics, using a structured work process based on the experience from facilitation of groups of managers. The idea was to explore whether it is possible to encourage and accelerate co-creation of new contributions by a facilitated process that would take advantage of a broader group of scholars with a more diverse range of perspectives than would occur when writing papers. An underlying issue is whether academic work is designable and academics are manageable? The open-minded participants agreed to partake in the experiment, which has now resulted in the five articles in this special issue that provide a substantial advance in theory about S-D logic. In this editorial, we will first describe the collaborative process used before, during and after the forum and then introduce the five articles.