Abstract
In the twenty-first century, ‘value’ is re-emerging as a vital and centrally important phenomenon. While value is, in many ways, a widely recognized and everyday term readily employed in a range of settings, equally, the nuanced myriad potential notions and conceptual understandings of ‘value’ are nevertheless perplexing to circumscribe yet often highly significant. Given the extensive span of, for example, populist, technical, academic, institutional and policymaking understandings of value, there exists, therefore, a rich, diverse and important domain for analysis.
Academically, the notion of value has a long pedigree. However, in the contemporary era, business, as in value creation for the business, or value to the business, often aligned with particular subject areas such as marketing and affiliated notions of, for example, service-dominant logic (SDL) have been predominant concerns in relation to the concept of value. This is perhaps to be expected to, in many ways, constitute a natural line of enquiry. At one level, value may be viewed as an inert identifier or simply a label for, for example, the price attributed or assigned to a given product or service. Here, there is a risk that value becomes equated with limited understandings and historic notions of the differential between labour cost and profit (following, for instance, classical economic analyses of the likes of Marx, Smith and Ricardo).
In an alternative casting, it is possibly useful to consider value as being aligned with a ‘process’, or ‘processes’ (an idea picked up in SDL of course), and equally with the engendering or possessing particular mindsets. Herein, value takes on verbal rather than nominal (i.e., noun-like) significance wherein value concerns adding, evolving, becoming, being, living, experiencing, developing, revealing, facilitating, engendering and indeed creating value. As such, the process of value development becomes as much a creative and developmental process as an economic one. It is replete with subjectivities and perceptions, which imbue the communities of organizations from individual through groups and teams to the overall entity per se.
Moreover, value can be seen as operating at all levels and at all places in organizations and organizational life. An important distinction, often made in extant literature, is the way in which value is viewed by top management tiers and boards in contrast to how value is perceived and engaged with at other points in the organization. Essentially, a key signal here is the degree to which any particular individual, group or agent is involved actively in process of value creation/creating value. Attempts to encapsulate such variety and richness of approaches and perceptions are often reflected in the efforts of pan-institutional initiatives and governmental policymakers (see, by way of illustration, the BS 76000 British Standards Institute: Human Resource: Valuing People—Management System—Requirements and Guidance, 2015). In summary, there is a need therefore to exert or progress towards greater understanding and consensus in relation to value definitions globally (inside and outside the domain of business). This embraces ongoing evaluation of the question of whether value is inherent or the result of processes or both, because then, commensurately, effort has to be assigned to each of these questions. If definitions are to elude the field, then we must at the very least explore the boundaries of what value may mean.
Value exists in many guises and dimensions. The special issue is of course concerned with the idea of value and its creation; however, equally, it signals that it is important to remain mindful of the risks of both conscious and non-conscious value destruction. The denigration and damage to value by individuals and organizations is a pervasive and perpetual risk and this critical dimension of value is considered at various points through the articles in the special issue. Furthermore, value can also be understood in its plural form as ‘values’. Through this lens, we see the emergence of dimensions which present a more social, ethical, qualitative and indeed even moralistic and individually subjective nature. Through such a gaze (Urry & Larsen, 2011) on ‘values’, there is a deliberate move away from an approach that concentrates on the physical and economic attributes of value towards one which could consider the belief systems, ideals and aspirations which may underpin and drive conceptualizations and operationalization of value. Thus, crucially, value as a concept and operationalized lived experience provides a bridge between the oft-cited divide between practitioner and academic communities. In part, this arises because value offers common and shared meanings in everyday life. However, deeper consideration and exploration of value, and moving beyond prima facie understandings, provides a basis of a dialogue on value creation which is of potentially high significance for issues of effectiveness and performance in complex and ambiguity-filled environments of contemporary organizational life and settings. By way of example, diversity on senior management groups and boards surfaces as a potentially key issue in being prepared and responding to these challenges (Grosvold, Brammer, & Rayton, 2007).
It is important to make a note on the planned nature, intent and selection of the articles in the special issue. Many of the articles are expressly short and the number of articles is deliberately large. This is intentional. While, in some regards, ‘value’ is a longstanding and widely debated concept, in many other ways, it is still surprisingly under-appreciated, and perhaps more importantly, not engaged with and implemented sufficiently extensively in organizational and operational settings. Therefore, the present collection aims to offer a montage and series of cameos that will create a platform from which to reassess, collate and redirect the debate and research on value and value creation. The special issue also draws on an array authors who are senior academics, practitioners, managers, consultant and policymakers in an attempt to underline and illustrate the replete nature of value.
The articles in the special issue provide a rich collection which elaborates and explores the aforementioned issues, and they have been clustered into two broad groups: those that reflect the academic thinking from different fields and those that echo more managerial/practitioner perspective. The opening articles of academic collection seek to define, conceptualize and circumscribe ‘value’. The first article in this group introduces the idea of ecosystem and value creation. In ‘Conceptualizing Value: A Service-ecosystem View’, Vargo, Akaka and Vaughan signal that from within the SDL perspective, value is prone to being cast as phenomenological, always co-created, multidimensional and emergent. Next, Grönroos, in his article ‘On Value and Value Creation: A Management Perspective’, points the debate on value towards a micro-foundational approach and heightens the importance of micro-perspectives considering approaches such as value-in-use, value-in-exchange and value-in-context. The following article ‘What’s in It for Me? The Creation and Destruction of Value for Firms from Stakeholders’ by Kumar and Rajan makes the important analysis of value through an engagement with the well-established concept of Stakeholder Theory (Freeman, 1984; Freeman & Reed, 1983). Paswan in ‘Consumer Value and Time’ challenges extant preoccupations in the consideration of value and points the way forward introducing an analysis through the variable of ‘time’. A temporal lens is demonstrated as revealing a range of fresh possibilities and perspectives on value. Finally, in this initial section of the special issue, in considering value creation paradoxically, it is also important to contemplate value destruction. This is raised in ‘Why Do We Need Research on Value co-destruction?’ by Plé. This article underlines the fragility of value and the need to see it clearly, engender it and protect and nurture it.
The next section of academic articles begin to apply value and value creation in relation to a range of specific contexts and issues. Kotler in his article titled ‘Customer Value Management’ argues that the marketer is not to create what he or she thinks is value to the customer but what the customer will perceive as value. Hallberg in ‘What is Value and How Is It Managed?’ undertakes value creation process through engagement with a basic value–price–cost framework and how this underpins and informs more sophisticated understandings of value and the buyer–supplier relationship. ‘Operationalizing Relative Customer Value’ by Keiningham, Aksoy and Cadet raises the interesting idea of relativities between company offerings of value and customer choice and decisions on how they may apportion their discretionary spend (sic: termed ‘wallet’/‘purse’) and the ways in which managers may respond to this. The final academic article by Keränen, ‘Towards a Broader Value Discourse: Understanding Sustainable and Public Value Potential’, broaches the issue of the creation of value in relation to sustainable initiatives and sustainability in general.
The third and final collection of articles in the special issue encompasses managerial/practitioner articles and commences with Liozu’s article: ‘Customer Value Is Not Just Created, It Is Formally Managed’ which subscribes to the view that in order to manage value, an intermediate process of ‘value capture’ needs to take place. The next article, ‘Future View—Evolving the Measurement of Best Customer Value from Using Total Cost of Ownership to Total Profit Added™’ by Snelgrove, raises the perils of allowing customers to become commoditized consumers—those who focus only on issues such as lowest price in a market place and are desensitized to a more relational connectivity with the company or organization. The final article of the special issue, ‘Value-dominant Logic (VDL)’ by Mahajan, proposes a holistic view that exists universally and encompasses what happens before and after (outside) the business and social ecosystem. This VDL approach looks at the needs perspective of the actors and the results to the actors.
In conclusion, as has been demonstrated, value and value creation have been surprisingly diachronically prevalent and persistent concepts. Nevertheless, context changes and a changed context (and the accompanying modifications in perspective) is prone to changing everything. The changing contexts and changing perspectives: geopolitical and regional, market, technological, sociological, ethical, ecological and so forth of the twenty-first century will ensure that value remains a key strategic issue for the current and forthcoming era. This special issue and the collections it assembles is an attempt to deepen and broaden understanding so as to better meet and address such challenges.