The reciprocal intertwining of practice and experience in value creation

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.

The appropriation cycle: novice and expert consumers

“…Second, this study extends the conceptualization of the appropriation process by illustrating consumers' interpretive responses to Miró's experience in terms of the appropriation cycles and accumulated cultural capital that are apparently absent in the extant literature (Carù and Cova, 2005;Ellway and Dean, 2016;Foreman Wernet and Dervin, 2016). It addresses research calls to move beyond the differences in novice and expert art consumers' cognitive processing of artistic stimuli and preferences in artistic styles, to investigate how consumers become involved in interpretive activities.…”

“…By contrast, the interpretive responses of expert consumers to the exhibition's aesthetic context and content reflected the interaction between these consumers' subjective experiences of appropriation practices and the exhibition's objective patterns of action (Ellway and Dean, 2016). In particular, the latter was manifested in the design of the exhibition including the labels, and tour guides invited expert consumers to tune into the voice of the curator about the experience at hand and to grasp insightful interpretations concerning the aesthetic qualities of Miró's artworks.…”

“…Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital is highly relevant to consumption of aesthetic experiences as related to consumption practices (Arsel and Thompson, 2010;Holt, 1998;Skandalis et al, 2016;Tapp and Warren, 2010), the appropriation process and sense-making activities (Derbaix and Gombault, 2016;Ellway and Dean, 2016;Hanquinet et al, 2014). Within this literature, Bourdieu's theory has been used to provide field-dependent understandings of practices that lead to appropriation and/or value creation of aesthetic experiences.…”

“…The case study adopts the phenomenological approach to aesthetic experience, conceiving it as a consumption experience that emerges from consumers' dialogical interaction with artworks (Chen, 2009). We follow this conceptualization since it assumes that consumers' interaction with an aesthetic experience (Ellway and Dean, 2016) is central to the sense-making dimension of aesthetic consumption (Yakhlef, 2015).…”

“…The appropriation cycle might not only vary across different experiential contexts but also a variety of appropriation sequences might occur within a single lived experience. Moreover, existing studies appear to neglect the connections between appropriation practices and sense-making activities (Aubert-Gamet, 1997; Ellway and Dean, 2016).…”