ORCID Profile
0000-0003-1369-7049
Current Organisation
The University of Auckland
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Publisher: Emerald
Date: 16-03-2022
DOI: 10.1108/JOSM-07-2021-0261
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to clarify how brand meaning evolves as an emergent property through the cocreation processes of stakeholders on multiple levels of a brand's service ecosystem. This provides new insight into the intersection between brands, consumers and society, and emphasizes the institutionally situated nature of brand meaning cocreation processes. It further lays a holistic foundation for a much-needed discussion on purpose-driven branding. Combining the ecosystem perspective of branding with the concept of social emergence allows clarification of brand meaning cocreation at different levels of aggregation. Emergence means collective phenomena – like social structures, concepts, preferences, states, mechanisms, laws and brand meaning – manifest from the interactions of in iduals. Drawing on Sawyer's (2005) social emergence perspective, the authors propose a processual multi-level framework to explore brand meaning emergence. Our framework spans five levels of brand meaning emergence: in idual (e.g. employees and customers) interactional (e.g. where work teams or friend groups interact) relational (e.g. where internal and external actors meet) strategic (e.g. markets and strategic alliances) and systemic (e.g. regulators, NGOs and society). It acknowledges that brand positioning is an inherently co-creative process of negotiating value propositions and aligning behaviors and beliefs among broad sets of actors, as opposed to a firm-centric task. Service research has only recently embraced a macro–micro perspective of branding processes. This paper extends that perspective by paying attention to the nested service ecosystems in which brand meaning emerges and the degree to which this process can (and cannot) be navigated by in idual actors.
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 24-09-2020
DOI: 10.1108/JBIM-03-2019-0131
Abstract: Combining institutional work and actor engagement (AE) literature, this paper aims to elucidate how the collective action of market shaping occurs through the interplay between market shapers’ institutional work and engagement of other market actors. While markets are shaped by actors’ purposive actions and recent literature notes the need to also mobilize AE, the underlying process remains nebulous. This paper is conceptual but supported by an illustrative case study: the Winding Tree. This blockchain-based, decentralized travel marketplace shapes a market by decoupling existing resource linkages, creating new ones and stabilizing others through a dynamic, iterative process between the market shaper’s institutional work and others’ AE. The paper develops a dynamic, iterative framework of market shaping through increased resource density, revealing the interplay between seven types of market shapers’ institutional work distilled from the literature and changes in other market actors’ engagement dispositions, behaviors and the diffusion of AE through the market. This research contributes to the emergent market shaping and market innovation literature by illustrating how the engagement of market actors is a fundamental means of market shaping. Specifically, it advances understanding of how market shapers’ institutional work leads to new resource linkages and higher resource density in emergent market systems through AE. The resultant framework offers an original, critical foundation for future market shaping research.
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 05-09-2018
DOI: 10.1108/JOSM-04-2018-0118
Abstract: The collaborative economy (CE), and within it, collaborative consumption (CC) has become a central element of the global economy and has substantially disrupted service markets (e.g. accommodation and in idual transportation). The purpose of this paper is to explore the trends and develop future scenarios for market structures in the CE. This allows service providers and public policy makers to better prepare for potential future disruption. Thought experiments – theoretically grounded in population ecology (PE) – are used to extrapolate future scenarios beyond the boundaries of existing observations. The patterns suggested by PE forecast developmental trajectories of CE leading to one of the following three future scenarios of market structures: the centrally orchestrated CE, the social bubbles CE, and the decentralized autonomous CE. The purpose of this research was to create CE future scenarios in 2050 to stretch one’s consideration of possible futures. What unfolds in the next decade and beyond could be similar, a variation of or entirely different than those described. Public policy makers need to consider how regulations – often designed for a time when existing technologies were inconceivable – can remain relevant for the developing CE. This research reveals challenges including distribution of power, insularity, and social compensation mechanisms that need consideration across states and national borders. This research tests the robustness of assumptions used today for significant, plausible market changes in the future. It provides considerable value in exploring challenges for public policy given the broad societal, economic, and political implications of the present market predictions.
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 16-02-2022
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to develop a holistic understanding for the shaping of resilient service ecosystems that considers tactics that act as stabilizing forces, and tactics that promote ersity and change and act as destabilizing forces – both central for service ecosystems to bounce forward in times of crises and beyond. This conceptual paper draws on theory on complex adaptive service ecosystems and work on organizational resilience and resilient systems. With a focus on Australia and New Zealand, stalwarts of the top three economies in Bloomberg’s COVID Resilience Ranking before the arrival of the Delta variant, this study illustrates how resilient service ecosystems can be shaped. This study explicates complexity related to navigating service ecosystems toward a new order in response to the pressures of major crises. It points to the importance of understanding both, how service ecosystems stabilize and change over time. It documents a portfolio of tactics that service organizations can use to influence resilience in the service ecosystems of which they are part. It further reflects on the potential downside of resilient service ecosystems, as they tilt toward rigid structures, failure to learn and an inability to transform or alternatively chaos. Service research has made progress in explicating how a service ecosystems perspective can inform crises management. This paper extends this work and explains how service ecosystems can be shaped to bounce not only back from the imposed pressures of a disruptive event but also forward toward a new order.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2022
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 22-03-2022
DOI: 10.1108/JOSM-01-2022-0044
Abstract: Wicked problems require holistic and systemic thinking that accommodates interdisciplinary solutions and cross-sectoral collaborations between private and public sectors. This paper explores how public relations (PR) – as a boundary-spanning function at the nexus of corporate and political discourse – can support societies to tackle wicked problems. This conceptual paper synthesizes literature on PR with a service ecosystem perspective. The authors use the service ecosystem design framework to structure the PR literature and develop a model of service ecosystem shaping for social change, which highlights the important role that PR can play in shaping processes. The authors explicate how PR can (1) facilitate value cocreation processes between broad sets of stakeholders that drive positive social change, (2) shape institutional arrangements in general and public discourse in particular, (3) provide a platform for recursive feedback loops of reflexivity and (re)formation that enables discourse to ripple through nested service ecosystems and (4) guide collective shaping efforts by bringing stakeholder concerns and beliefs into the open, which provides a foundation for collective sense-making of wicked problems and their solutions. This paper explains the complexity of shaping service ecosystems for positive social change. Specifically, it highlights how solving wicked problems and driving social change requires reconfiguration of the institutional arrangements that guide various nested service ecosystems. The authors discuss in detail how PR can contribute to the shaping of service ecosystems for social change and present a future research agenda for both service and PR scholars to consider.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-02-2019
No related grants have been discovered for Julia A. Fehrer.