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Geiger, Susi
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Geiger, Susi
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Geiger, Susi
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Now showing 1 - 10 of 28
- PublicationAdding Value to International Business Education: An Irish-American Road Map to Service LearningThis article summarises the experience of two undergraduate schools of business, one in Ireland and one in the United States, in developing an international service learning programme for study-abroad students. Working from an already existing partnership, the schools established an academically-based programme with a support structure for students administered by both institutions. Practical considerations required the Irish partner institution establish its own service learning programme and that the United States partner institution assist in that through a visiting professorship. In the process of this collaborative effort the actors were reminded of the importance of academic and strategic compatibility; senior administrative support; making room for cultural differences; and listening to the student voice. This case is presented as an example of the lessons learned along the road of achieving the combined benefits of study abroad and service learning.
312 - PublicationMarket mash ups: The process of combinatorial market innovationThis paper investigates market innovation that takes place at the intersection of previously weakly connected markets. Based on a longitudinal study of the development of the digital therapeutics market, we delineate the concept of combinatorial market innovation as a market innovation process that is characterized by the deliberate synthesis of market subprocesses from two (or more) existing markets. We develop a conceptualization of combinatorial market innovation related to five market subprocesses (configuring exchange agents, qualifying offerings, fashioning modes of exchange, generating market representations, and establishing market norms). Focusing on how these processes interact, we identify three distinct types of intertwinement – sequential interrelation, mutual reinforcement, and interference. We also reflect on the need for market innovation studies to more strongly consider overlaps and adjacencies between markets and market systems.
113 - PublicationDoes hype create irreversibilities? Affective circulation and market investments in digital healthThis paper draws from two conceptual lenses - the sociology of expectations and market studies - to investigate the relationship between technology hype and market investments: which promises and expectations surround hype and how they come together to shape actors' investments in an emerging market. We address this question through analysing a contemporary hype in a technology marketing context: digital healthcare. Our aim is to trace: how market actors create, support and evaluate a market hype; how hype and market investments are related, and whether hype contributes to irreversibilities in shaping emerging market forms and categories. Our study indicates that hypes contribute tangibly to producing the market, not least by channelling financial, symbolic and material market investments. Further, by highlighting how socio-economic, technological and policy promises become affectively loaded through circulation, we add a novel dimension to existing insights into the socio-cognitive construction of markets. We caution technology marketers, policy makers and investors against blindly following technology hype, especially when it encourages companies to engage in market investment that is unhinged from broader systems and societal, ethical or economic concerns.
350 - PublicationHealthcare Activism, Marketization, and the Collective GoodThis chapter engages with three key dynamics of contemporary healthcare - digitalization, marketization and individualization. It draws on several theoretical frameworks to conceptualize the notion of collective good and to consider how healthcare activism may play into defining and defending the collective good when faced with the outlined societal, economic, and scientific dynamics. Presenting contemporary examples from the Covid-19 pandemic, the chapter argues that the way activists define and defend the collective good can only fully be understood by grasping how this good is shaped by other, often more dominant, stakeholders in healthcare: governmental institutions, professional experts, scientists, and private industry – the latter being a focal point of concern for this current volume.
1256 - PublicationInterpersonal influence strategies in complex B2B sales and the socio-cognitive construction of relationship valueThe investigation of how exactly salespeople create value at the individual level of interaction is still incomplete. While there have been lively debates on value creation and co-creation processes at the organizational level in the business marketing literature, researchers have paid much less attention to the fact that such processes almost always start at the interpersonal level of buyer-seller interactions. Through utilizing a symbolic interactionist perspective and the ethnographic research method of shadowing, the present study moves research insights into value creation in sales forward by depicting the detailed activities and tactics that influence customers' value perceptions during the sales encounter. We complement the sales influence literature with three additional tactics: disrupt, reassure and dedicate. We also expand the framework of value creation in sales interactions by identifying three value strategies that change, strengthen or expand customer value perceptions through different socio-cognitive mechanisms.
972Scopus© Citations 48 - PublicationPersonal selling as knowledge-based activity: communities of practice in salesThis research posits personal selling as a knowledge-based activity. In their day-to-day interaction with customers, sales personnel gain priceless insights into their personalities, likes and dislikes, their process requirements or their position in formal and informal networks. If such ‘soft’ knowledge is externalised and made available in organisations, it can be a highly precious asset in developing genuine customer-oriented marketing and sales strategies. In most firms, however, such knowledge is not included in databases and other technological means of knowledge exchange. Using the Grounded Theory method, an exploratory investigation is undertaken to examine if and how such personal customer knowledge is shared in sales teams. The findings point toward the importance of so-called ‘communities of practice’ in the sales organisation and show that knowledge exchange is inseparable from the social environment in which it is created and put to use.
942 - PublicationConstructing and Contesting Markets through the Market ObjectThis paper focuses on the work that market actors undertake in order to stabilize and de-stabilize market objects. We briefly revisit Igor Ansoff's classic product–market strategy matrix to show how marketing management literature typically equates stability in markets with commodification and inertia. To escape this inertia, marketers often ‘warm up’ or destabilize existing market objects by changing the material bases of the object, for instance in incremental product development. But this ‘warming up’ invites other market actors to also question or destabilize the networks that are supposed to hold the market object in its new (market) space. We utilize archival research to trace one case each of market and product development within the pharmaceutical realm, demonstrating: first, the effort market actors put into ‘cooling down’ and ‘warming up’ market objects; second, how contested such efforts can be; and third, how the object's material attachments may limit its symbolic malleability.
1380Scopus© Citations 31 - PublicationEmotional Timescapes: The Temporal Perspective and Consumption Emotions in ServicesThis exploratory study examines how the temporal aspect of service consumption impacts the emotions that are created within consumers during service encounters. The authors adopted mobile phone or 'SMS' diaries to capture the emotions that participants experienced at the very moment they were being felt or 'in-vivo'. The study suggests that the temporal perspective is a dominant cause of consumption emotions in services, influencing consumers’ emotions from before the service encounter commences to its conclusion, and in some cases beyond the conclusion of the service event. Other antecedents of consumption emotions such as interactions with staff and the service scape are influenced by, and interwoven with this temporal aspect. By capturing emotions as they were experienced, recall difficulties that might have been encountered had the emotions been measured retrospectively were eliminated, allowing the researchers to construct a comprehensive account of the chronology and contiguity of the emotions created within consumers during service encounters. While certain aspects of time such as the consequences of queuing and waiting have been addressed in the services marketing literature, a detailed understanding of how time impacts consumption emotions in services from the start to the conclusion of service encounters has not been undertaken to date. This research addresses that gap by examining how the temporal perspective influences not only consumption emotions in customers per se but how it also influences other causes of consumption emotions that customers encounter during service transactions.
891Scopus© Citations 27 - PublicationA platform approach in solution business: How platform openness can be used to control solution networksThis paper explores how customer solution providers leverage digital platform architectures and particularly platform openness to exert control over complex organizational networks. A multiple case-study approach studies three companies with digital platforms that orchestrate solution networks in the LED and ICT industries. Our findings show that the features of product modules (core or peripheral), service modules (relationship intensity and customization), and knowledge modules (explicit, tacit and codified) have differential influence on the levels of platform openness. By managing platform openness of different subsystems accordingly, the solution providers can achieve different control benefits, including ensuring module quality, increasing offering variety, reducing dependence on module providers, and facilitating resource sharing. We contribute to the literature on solution business by reconceptualising the platform approach from a two-level perspective. We also deepen the field's understanding of the role of digital platforms in solution business from an architectural perspective.
239Scopus© Citations 19 - PublicationSilicon Valley, disruption, and the end of uncertaintyThis paper reflects on the relationship between hi-tech disruption narratives and uncertainty. My main argument is that an economic sociology of the future is incomplete without addressing the ‘demonic’ or rather eschatological elements apparent in the promissory twin rhetoric of disruption and inevitability that a number of contemporary technology firms employ. The conjuring up of liberatory hi-tech futures implicates a political-philosophical perspective of the end game. It utilizes at once the productive power of uncertainty to create visions of ‘absolute riches’ and societal gain but at the same time narrows these futures down to one inevitable alternative to the status quo. Through the examples of two Silicon Valley disruptor firms I argue that these eschatological narratives need to be opened to social scientific critique in order to examine their potential societal consequences above and beyond the narrow geographic confines of ‘the Valley’.
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