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The reciprocal intertwining of practice and experience in value creation

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Marketing Theory

Published online on

Abstract

Practice and experience are central concepts in service logic (SL), and research has provided increasingly sophisticated accounts of their role within value creation. However, to date, they have been largely treated separately and despite acknowledgement that they are intertwined, the precise nature of their relationship remains unclear. To respond to this problem, we introduce Bourdieu’s recursive triad of practice–habitus–field as a theoretical lens to articulate how sensemaking processes incorporate an explicit link between practice and experience. We then utilize the theoretical lens to examine value creation for participants of a self-reliance training course. Our article contributes to the theorization of value creation by showing how it is dependent upon the temporal intertwining of practice and experience; how the unconscious or anticipated/foreseen nature of practice and experience become manifested in value creation and how zooming in and zooming out can be simultaneously achieved to acknowledge the individual and contextual influences upon value creation. We present a dynamic model of practice-experience links in value creation, which both extends the theory of SL and provides a basis for further work. The article concludes with managerial implications.