John O'Shaughnessy

Difference in Attribute Importance for Different Industrial Products

used by purchasing agents to select suppliers varies with the type of problem likely to arise in adopting the particular product, and whether such differences in choice criteria are consistent between purchasing agents in the United States and the United Kingdom. The buyers choice criteria are the factors he uses to evaluate competitive offerings. Choice criteria are inferred to exist because industrial buyers can and do articulate their reasons for choosing one supplier rather than another.

The service‐dominant perspective: a backward step?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the “service dominant” perspective advocated by Vargo and Lusch and applauded by so many marketing academics in the USA is neither logically sound nor a perspective to displace others in marketing.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a conceptual analysis of the Vargo and Lusch paper that takes account of the implications of the service perspective being adopted as the perspective to replace all others.Findings – The paper finds that the definition of services, seeking as it does to embrace all types of marketing, is too broad to have much operational meaning, while the focusing on activities rather than functions misdirects marketing altogether. Vargo and Lusch revive the claim that marketing should be viewed as a technology, the aim being to discover the techniques and rules (principles) applying to marketing. However, indifference to theoretical considerations encourages crudeness and the cultivation of ad hoc solutions. The Vargo and Lus...

Using versus Choosing: The Relationship of the Consumption Experience to Reasons for Purchasing

Discusses conceptual links between consuming and buying by indicating reasons for adopting a macro‐level perspective that focuses on products, rather than brands, as the units of analysis. Investigates, empirically, in a study, which collected data on want‐based purchasing reasons and used perceptions from independent samples from UK housewives. Posits that two salient reasons exist for studying such consumption (not purchasing) phenomena: first, experiential aspects of consumption; and second, consumption phenomena (or its anticipation) which are likely to exert a strong influence on buying decisions. Reports that the results herein reported must be viewed as exploratory in nature, with still undetermined potential for generalization to the UK population, or to other cultures. Suggests, finally, that reasons for usage differ markedly between product categories, but, within a product category, reasons for choosing brands tend to be similar.

Service‐dominant logic: a rejoinder to Lusch and Vargo's reply

Purpose – This paper is a rejoinder to Lusch and Vargos defense of their service‐dominant logic paper against criticism.Design/methodology/approach – The paper responds to Lusch and Vargos defense and criticism of the initial article primarily through examining the logic of their case.Findings – The paper finds that both the charges and the arguments against the criticism have no merit.Research limitations/implications – The paper offers guidance as to the approach needed to advance the study of service marketing. This rejects the notion that viewing all businesses as service entities is a progressive approach but recommends a disjunctive definition of service, which would throw up service‐categories that needed to be studied in their own right if progress is to be made.Originality/value – The paper suggests that Lusch and Vargos S‐D‐dominant logic is unlikely to be practically fruitful while remaining theoretically limited.

Ways of Knowing and their Applicability

This article takes the three ways of knowing in science, namely natural history, analysis and experimentation to argue for the importance of selecting the appropriate approach or approaches according to what problems or questions are being addressed. It is claimed that ignoring this guideline leads to invalid findings, inadequate explanations or suboptimal results. The claim is illustrated by a number of current but unsound approaches to marketing problems.

A Reply to "A Cautionary Note on 'Difference in Attribute Importance for Different Industrial Products' "

First, as both we and Semon point out, the purchasing agents role is likely to be different, at least in terms of influence, depending on the type of purchase involved. However, this does not mean that his views should be disregarded even though his influence in selecting offerings/suppliers of (say) performance problem products may be minimal. Purchasing agents are always part of the decision-making process that involves themselves, technical, and operational personnel, and their views can be expected to reflect that experience. Furthermore, since our analysis deals with the perceived importance of various factors, exactly what weighting scheme Semon has in mind is unclear.

Book Review: The Flight From Reality in the Human Sciences: Ian Shapiro Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005

theory, and (2) an empiricism that looks to observation as the basic foundation for knowledge claims. His exemplar of logicism is the economist’s rational choice theory (RCT). Shapiro argues that RCTs have degenerated into elaborate exercises to salvage the notion that there are universalistscope theories. He points to the many variants of RCT imposing different assumptions about the sorts of utilities people maximize, the sort of beliefs they endorse, and the way they acquire and process information. He concludes by saying that little has been learned with few applications of RCT that are at once arresting and sustainable. For Shapiro, RCT is an illustration of method-driven research in contrast to the need for problem-driven research. While rational choice theorists see themselves as simply seeking the boundaries for applications of RCT, Shapiro sees them as putting the cart before the horse in not seeing the need to first select problems worthy of investigation but instead prone to select descriptions of phenomena that favor RCT and manipulating data to fit RCT presuppositions. In illustrating how method-driven research leads to fallacious analysis, he chooses Richard Posner’s microeconomic conception of judicial efficiency. Richard Posner is a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, seventh circuit, who founded the law and economics movement. A prolific writer and commentator, his neat choice of words makes him easily quotable but also a formidable opponent. But Shapiro takes him on and shows how, in being so method driven, Posner’s logic slips up badly, with Shapiro arguing that Posner’s theory of wealth maximization, as the reality of judicial activity, tries to turn a highly controversial thesis into an axiom. The chapters on RCT and Posner are very worth reading. Shapiro makes a major issue of the human sciences’ being method driven, that they need to become problem driven, guided by scientific realism, if true scientific progress is to be made. Shapiro uses a variation of the metaphor of the method-driven researcher being like the little boy with the hammer who finds everything needs pounding: with his bag of statistical techniques, the researcher sees his job as seeking applications, resulting in the manufacture of problems that match his techniques. Furthermore, method-driven research involves the researcher in selecting a topic and a description of the topic that fits the methods he wishes to employ. Shapiro argues that method-driven research is apt to conflate theory-driven and method-driven research in that, say, RCT is manipulated to act as a method instead of a theory. A researcher who is problem driven needs to specify the problem divorced from any consideration of the theories or methods deployed to study it. In marketing, it is a common complaint that some top journals are only concerned with error terms in that the main means of evaluating a piece of research is whether it predicts outcomes like market share, and to the extent they cannot, THE FLIGHT FROM REALITY IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES

Review: An Argument for Mind Jerome Kagan New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006

deterministic relation between a conditioned stimulus and conditioned response. John Watson, who pioneered behaviorism, rejected as unscientific any resort to nonobservables, so brain and mind and all mental concepts were simply ignored. It was denied that humans could acquire new behavior just by watching and imitating others perhaps because it was assumed that no one did anything unless rewarded. There was this firm belief (or more correctly, faith) that he and other behaviorists could achieve just about any behavioral change through the power of conditioning. Kagan shows that hard evidence does not shift beliefs when such beliefs are basic to the accepted orthodoxy. The experiments that showed that rats could not learn an association between light and a subsequent feeling of illness but easily learned an association between a distinct taste and the subsequent, unpleasant sensations were dismissed by one prominent learning theorist as “no more likely than bird shit in a cuckoo clock” (Frank 1988, 149). In other words, there was a failure to face up to the implications that each animal had biological preferences that could not always be ignored. As Kagan says, we may condition sexual arousal to the perfume worn by a romantic partner but not to the color of the pillow on which the lovers rest. Kagan does not specifically discuss Skinner’s contribution in operant conditioning. In contrast to Watson, Skinner claimed that unobservable thoughts and feelings could be scientifically studied if these thoughts and feelings are viewed as conditioned responses, not causes of behavior. But, in this, he still remains true to Watson’s legacy in viewing the mind as an epiphenomenon. Kagan credits behaviorists with three nontrivial advances: (1) the discovery of principles of conditioning going beyond Pavlov’s findings; (2) the significance of the conditioning stimulus, particularly its unexpectedness; and (3) the special biological properties of each species. However, after about 1964, the limited explanatory scope of behaviorism led to diminishing interest in it.

Book Reviews: Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences: Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005:

(Case studies are a subset of qualitative methods, and the authors in the Preface direct us to the Web site for the Consortium on Qualitative Research Methods (CQRM): www.asu.edu/clas/polisci/cqrm.) Few marketing academics have not at one time or another reflected on whether marketing cases could not be put to more use than just being instruments for sharpening students’ marketing acumen in class discussion. This is particularly so for macromarketing where experiments are less feasible. Could not bringing together “similar” cases contribute to theory? This book by two political scientists, Alexander George and Andrew Bennett, should cause many to think afresh about the potential of case studies for the development of theory. The authors define a case as an instance of a class of events and case studies as “small-n” studies in contrast to “large-N” statistical studies. It is taken for granted that cases can be categorized based on similarity, for example, problem encountered, and that it is possible to formulate generalizations of theoretical interest. History is often regarded of as an ideographic discipline seeking to understand the unique event, in contrast to the nomothetic disciplines that seek abstract laws. This distinction, though, requires unpacking. What it should mean is that there are no lessons of history in the sense of law-like generalizations. It doesn’t mean there are no lessons from history. To deny this is to deny that experience has anything to teach. George and Bennett would agree and disavow the notion there are laws to be deduced from case studies; however, they nonetheless claim the analysis of cases can help identify causal mechanisms allowing the researcher to make contingency (“it all depends”) theories of limited scope. The authors illustrate the difference between a law and a mechanism as analogous to that between a static correlation (“If X, then Y”) and a process (“X leads to Y through steps A, B, C). Following the sociologist Robert Merton (1957), they suggest case study research aims for middle-range theories that consist of well-specified generalizations of limited scope. They claim statistical methods have difficulty obtaining operational measures of “slippery variables” and are just not suited to testing causal mechanisms in the context of particular cases, where frequency distributions from large samples are not available. Cases at the minimum can test current theories, and the authors quote how one case study (see Lipset, Trow, and Coleman, 1956) contradicted the well-known law of oligarchy (how oligarchies ultimately prevail in government) put forward by Robert Michels (1949) in his seminal work on political parties. If we wish to go beyond correlation to causation in causally driven decision processes, statistical methods are not very helpful. Case studies, the authors argue, are more efficient at discovering the scope conditions of “theories” and evaluating claims about causal necessity or sufficiency in specific instances, than at gauging generalized causal effects or the causal weights of variables across a wide range of cases, at present the province of statistical methods. Cases, too, can supplement whatever theories we possess as deviant cases can uncover new or omitted variables, test hypotheses, or discover causal paths and mechanisms. The usefulness of statistical-correlation findings is considerably reduced when, as is commonly the case, such studies do not identify causal variables that decision makers can influence. Established statistical generalizations tend to be undermined when confronted with case histories. This is not surprising when we consider the crucial importance of contextual factors in explaining or understanding behavior. As summarized by the authors,

New Books Board

Bok, Derek. 2003. Universities in the marketplace: The commercialization of higher education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Breckinridge, Carol, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds. 2002. Cosmopolitanism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brown, Stephen, and John Sherry Jr., eds. 2003. Time, space, and the market: Retroscapes rising. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Crowley, David, and Susan Reid, eds. 2002. Socialist spaces: Sites of everyday life in the eastern block. Oxford, UK: Berg. Doctorow, Cory. 2003. Down and out in the magic kingdom. New York: Tom Doherty Associates. Farquhar, Judith. 2002. Appetites: Food and sex in post-socialist China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Flyvbjerg, Bent. 2003. Making social science matter. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Fraser, Craig. 2002. Shack chic: Art and innovation in South African shacklands. Capetown, South Africa: Quivertree. Friedwald, Will. 2002. Stardust melodies: The biography of twelve of America’s most popular songs. New York: Pantheon Books. Garrett, Valery M. 2002. Heaven is high, the emperor far away: Merchants and mandarins in Old Canton. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Gibson, William. 2003. Pattern recognition. New York: G. P. Putnam. Godin, Seth. 2002. Survival is not enough: Zooming, evolution and the future of your company. New York: Free Press. Greenfield, Susan. 2003. Tomorrow’s people: How 21st-century technology is changing the way we think and feel. London: Penguin/Allen Lane. Gutierrez, Laurent, Ezio Manzini, and Valérie Portefaix, eds. 2002. HK lab. Hong Kong: Map Book. Hackley, Christopher E. 2003. Doing research projects in marketing, management, and consumer research. London: Routledge. Hunt, Shelby. 2003. Controversy in marketing theory: For reason, realism, truth, and objectivity. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Lears, Jackson. 2003. Something for nothing: Luck in America. New York: Viking. Link, Perry, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz, eds. 2002. Popular China: Unofficial culture in a globalizing society. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Mazzarella, William. 2003. Shoveling smoke: Advertising and globalization in contemporary India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Neidhart, Christoph. 2003. Russia’s carnival: The smells, sights, and sounds of transition. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. O’Shaughnessy, John, and Nicholas Jackson O’Shaughnessy. 2003. The marketing power of emotion. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Osteen, Mark, ed. 2002. The question of the gift: Essays across disciplines. London: Routledge. Otnes, Cele, and Elizabeth H. Pleck. 2003. Cinderella dreams: The allure of the lavish wedding. Berkeley: University of California Press. Parr, Martin. 2002. From our house to your house. Stockport, UK: Dewi Lesis. Postrel, Virginia. 2003. The substance of style: How the rise of aesthetic value is remaking commerce, culture, and consciousness. New York: HarperCollins. Rea, Michael C. 2003. World without design: The ontological consequences of naturalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Ritzer, George. 2004. The globalization of nothing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Ruoff, Jeffrey. 2002. An American family: A televised life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rupp, Katherine. 2003. Gift-giving in Japan: Cash, connections, cosmologies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Schweder, Richard A. 2003. Why do men barbecue? Recipes for cultural psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Szmigin, Isabelle. 2003. Understanding the consumer. London: Sage. Wolfram, Stephen. 2002. A new kind of science. Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media. Zaltman, Gerald. 2003. How customers think: Essential insights into the mind of the market. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.