A Systems Perspective on Markets: Toward a Research Agenda

By Stephen Louis Vargo, Kaisa Koskela-Huotari, Steve Baron, Bo Edvardsson, Javier Reynoso, Maria Colurcio. 2017

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper addresses the implications of an emerging, increasingly important way of thinking about markets: systems thinking. A market is one of the most founational abstractions in marketing and business research; yet, it often receives too little attention. As a result, the taken-for-granted assumptions about markets spur from over-simplified conceptualizations of neoclassical economics that depict markets as static and mechanistic. Systems thinking represents a major change in perspective that involves transcending this mechanistic worldview and thinking instead in terms of wholes, relationships, processes, and patterns. We argue that building a theory of markets based on systems thinking, would enable scholars to develop more realistic models that correspond with fast-changing business environment and therefore, increase both the rigor and relevance of future research. To further this aim, we identify the main implications of systems thinking and formulate them into a research agenda to further the systemic understanding of markets.

Subfields: Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ff8a2a8db42146d43a5cf8d09cbe539636c487b5