Gabriele Troilo

Organizational Drivers of Salespeople’s Customer Orientation and Selling Orientation

The practice of customer-oriented selling (COS) has been identified as a key variable in an era of relationship selling and consultative selling. However, compared with the “traditional” selling orientation (SO), COS requires greater expenditure of effort by the salesperson in customer interactions. As a consequence, salespeople have to be motivated to engage in this mode of selling, but, unfortunately, factors that motivate customer orientation are still not well known. Our study develops and tests a model of organizational drivers of COS and SO on a sample of 326 managers. Such organizational drivers refer to the company culture, structure, strategy, and systems. We also analyze the effect of COS and SO on the creation of superior customer value.

Organizational Creativity: A New Perspective from Cognitive Systems Theory

In recent years scholars have increasingly paid more attention to knowledge management in the firm. The different ways of generating and transferring knowledge among individuals and organizations have been widely analysed (Nonaka, 1988, 1991; Badaracco, 1991; Vicari, 1991; Kogut and Zander, 1992; Leonard-Barton, 1995; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; von Krogh and Roos, 1996; Sanchez and Heene, 1997; Davenport and Prusak, 1998). Attention has also been paid to the organizational conditions which enable learning and knowledge acquisition (Argyris and Schon, 1978; Duncan and Weiss, 1979; Shrivastava, 1983; Fiol and Lyles, 1985; Senge, 1990) and the processes of knowledge codification and storage (Weick, 1979; Hedberg, 1981; Sims and Gioia, 1986; Sackmann, 1991; Walsh and Ungson, 1991). Such studies have often been carried out from different epistemological perspectives, leading to the definition and use of different constructs and interpretative categories (von Krogh and Roos, 1995, 1996).

Re-thinking the relationship between self and other: Levinas and narratives of beautifying the body

In the consumer research literature, the automatic consideration of one’s knowledge of self in the evaluation of others is taken for granted. The ‘idea of the other’ — which the authors here term ‘representational subjectivity’ — is at the heart of consumer decisions. Philosopher Emanuel Levinas suggests another path: the concrete relation to the other person is the basis of subjectivity. He makes the distinction between ‘other’ (as in environment and things) and ‘Others’ as in persons. Affective subjectivity arises in the enjoyment of things around an individual and precedes representation. Ethical subjectivity makes an individual realize that not everything can be assimilated to the self. It is in this moment that ethical subjectivity is realized. The authors explain these themes in the realm of beauty, a domain where ongoing moral judgments are made. The authors offer a correction to the taken-for-granted relationship between the self and the other with a focus on the pre-reflective affective self and the ethical self, each of which is shaken out of its complacency with the appearance of another person.