Abstract
Over the centuries, the polysemic concept of value has attracted the interest of individuals and researchers coming from several disciplines, such as psychology, ethics, jurisprudence, education and economics. This made the studies around value meaning and its generation fascinating and stimulating in every age. In fact, this concept passes from the multiplicity of meanings to the indefinability of the predicate, which depends upon individual and/or collective desire or interest (Parker, 1934). According to this perspective, the cultural dimension of value emerges from and is based on ‘the conceptual resources it makes available for thinking about the aesthetic dimensions of the natural world’ (Raz et al., 2005, p. 2). This implies that value is strictly dependent on social practice because the way we relate to valuable ‘objects’ and the significance we attach them tend to be influenced by the social conditions in which we live (Raz, 1985).
Currently, the Oxford Dictionary provides a generic and concise definition of value, according to which it is ‘the worth, desirability or utility of a thing’. However, assuming computational perspective, value remains a fuzzy number or variable defined in linguistic terms (Carlsson & Fullér, 1998). It follows that its current definitions remain fuzzy and not exhaustive because value conceptualization tend to be highly influenced by its nature and the context in which it emerges.
Recently, economics and managerial research has defined value as ‘an asset and is thus part of social capital for projects and in embedded in firms’ (Smyth et al., 2010).
It is worth noting that—in current business scenarios—value is a pivotal concept for almost all the theories dealing with business competition. This also supports Raz affirmation in terms of value dependence on social practices; thus, both economics and managerial literature recognized it (Holttinen, 2010; Lyons & Mehta, 1997; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004), opening to a more holistic approach to value. Regardless the definition of value, in economics and managerial research the focus of the studies is to understand mainly how value is created and exchanged even if it is differently defined in its meaning. A relevant research stream is focused on value creation and value co-creation practices. In this sense, Gustafsson et al. (2012) approached value in business as a dyadic relationship—based on mutual trust—between firms and customers pointing to offer them some valuable outputs, such as consistency in service provision, product quality, promise-fulfilment, fairness and competences.
Focusing on value creation, it has to be reported that it is a simple, but strategically relevant and inclusive concept, which has been differently defined. Borys and Jemison (1989) considered it as a process based on business partners’ exchange capabilities, which merged together can led to improve the competitive advance at least of one partner. More recently, value has been approached as ‘a contribution to a customer’s well-being, from the customer’s perspective’ (Grönroos & Gummerus, 2014, p. 222) and its creation as ‘the customer’s process of extracting value from the usage of resources’ (p. 209). However, value creation also deals with ability to create a perceived use value, a process strictly related to the concept of value capture, which is the capturing exchange value (Bowman & Ambrosini, 2000) or the appropriation of value itself (Lepak et al., 2007). In this sense, Grönroos and Voima (2012) considered value creation as a process which deeply involves customers, who take part to it with their physical and mental activities, practices and experiences. It follows that this process plays a positive influence on customer satisfaction; thus, ‘whether the customer feels s/he got benefits and services over what s/he paid’ (Mahajan, 2020, p. 119). Therefore, another important concept—customer value—can be defined as the importance that a customer perceives of a product/service if compared to some others (Kumar & Reinartz, 2016; Mahajan, 2016).
Service researchers and, in particular, Service Dominant Logic (SDL) (Grönroos et al., 2015; Grönroos & Voima, 2012; Vargo & Lusch, 2004, 2010) built their research framework on the value co-creation concept (Alves et al., 2016; Grönroos & Voima, 2013; Payne et al., 2008; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004; Ramaswamy & Ozcan, 2020; Storbacka et al., 2016). Value co-creation is one of the foundational concepts of the SDL (Vargo & Lusch, 2004, 2006, 2010), which considers value ‘always co-created, jointly and reciprocally, in interactions among providers and beneficiaries through the integration of resources and application of competences’ (Vargo et al., 2008, p. 146). According to this approach, value is co-created for reciprocally and mutually benefitting the involved actors; thus, it is not limited to the traditional dyad made up of service provider and customers, but it involves a growing number of participants (e.g., actors). In fact, Vargo et al. (2008) maintained that ‘value is co-created through the combined efforts of firms, employees, customers, stockholders, government agencies and other entities related to any given exchange, but is always determined by the beneficiary (e.g., customer)’ (Vargo et al., 2008, p. 147).
Value is considered a ‘systemic property’, which goes beyond the individual and/or the collective level opening to an ecosystem dimension (Chandler & Vargo, 2011).
Due to its inner subjectivity, it is hard to completely explain the nature, the creation and the role of value. To survive, firms belonging to different industries and markets give and get economic and non-economic value, creating stimuli, solutions and offerings for customers.
Often companies create value for customers stimulating their satisfaction and loyalty. However, they also tend to extract part of this customer value as profit, creating economic value for the firm itself (Kumar & Reinartz, 2016).
Entrepreneurs, managers and many other stakeholders’ groups have recognized the criticality of value, which is directly or indirectly connected with the business context. It follows that, probably, value should be considered able to drive the dominant logic for companies (Mahajan, 2019). The last year Business Roundtable underlined the relevance of value creation as a foundation for any business entity (Business Roundtable, 2020). The events that are upsetting to the world (e.g., the Covid19 pandemic, terrorism, politic and financial instabilities) have also led people to focus on the fundamental topics able to express the value pillars for societies and markets. Between these, the USA Business Roundtable suggests searching for value coming from healthcare, infrastructure, immigration, training and education, economy, international relationships, climate change and justice (Business Roundtable—Policy perspectives).
The special issue ‘Creating value in business’ in this Volume of Journal of Creating Value (JCV) follows the first effort presented on the same JCV in 2017 related ‘Service Value Creation’, but it is aimed to add new outlooks about the value concept even including the business context. Even considering the multiple perspectives presented by the authors dealing with value definition, creation and destruction, the definition of value itself is confirmed like slippery if not accurately contextualized. The world scenario continuously stimulates managers to question themselves about the way companies approach the value they provide to stockholders, customers, partners and to the society at large.