The internet as a relationship marketing tool - some evidence from Irish companies

This article explores the strategies underlying the use of the internet as a marketing tool by Irish businesses. Three different approaches to internet Marketing are described: the ornamental, the informational and the relational. It is shown that, theoretically, the internet offers a unique opportunity for marketers to build up and maintain relationships with their clients. However, data collected through a mail survey and a content analysis of web sites reveal that currently the most frequent use of the internet by Irish companies still follows an ornamental or, at most, informational pattern. The authors discuss whether this discrepancy between internet potential and practice is due to the social basis of market relationships or whether it can be seen as evidence that the adaptation of a new marketing tool follows an incremental pattern

In the name of transparency:Organizing European pharmaceutical markets through struggles over transparency devices

The controversies surrounding the heavily redacted contracts between the European Commission and Covid-19 vaccine producers have highlighted ‘transparency’ as a hotly debated concept in the pharmaceutical market. We combine research on transparency with literature on the organization of markets to investigate how such struggles over competing visions of transparency end up shaping markets and their politics. Focusing on the case of the European pharmaceutical market, we demonstrate how market transparency was implemented through devices that enacted specific visions of transparency and produced distinct market organizations over time: transparency for states (until about 1990), transparency for corporations (ca. 1990 to 2010) and transparency for state coalitions (since 2010). We discuss how the specific instrumentations and materializations of such visions of transparency play a crucial role in market politics. This debate also highlights why engaging in controversies over transparency has become increasingly important for those contesting the market status quo – in pharmaceutical markets and beyond.European Commission Horizon 2020European Research CouncilLeverhulme TrustAhead of print to check citing and date details in 6

You and me and the in-between: what sales professionals know about their client relationships: a grounded analysis

This PhD dissertation draws from philosophical and psychological arguments as well as from current discussions in knowledge management to put forward a conception of sales people’s customer knowledge as tacit, situational, pragmatic and action-related. Depth-interviews and observational methods are used to examine the nature of sales people’s customer knowledge; data are analysed following the grounded theory method. The empirical investigation establishes that a sales person’s knowledge of the client cannot be dissected from the relationship in which it is created and put to use. The sales person knows her customers in and through the relationship she builds and maintains with them; customer knowledge is first and foremost relational knowledge. Such relational knowledge is social in nature and it is almost exclusively experiential knowledge: it is built up, developed and changed during the interaction with the client. This view of customer knowledge sheds a new light on such issues as the use of sales automation tools, sales team interaction and sales training; most crucially, it broadens the existing cognitive selling paradigm to take account of the social construction of the sales encounter

Healthcare Activism, Marketization, and the Collective Good

This introductory chapter charts the book’s trajectory by engaging with three interlinked key dynamics of contemporary healthcare—marketization, digitalization, and individualization. It draws on several theoretical frameworks to conceptualize notions of the common, collective, or public good and to consider how healthcare activism may play into defining and defending the collective good when faced with the outlined societal, economic, and scientific dynamics. Presenting contemporary examples from the Covid-19 pandemic, the chapter argues that the way activists define and defend the collective good can only fully be understood by grasping how this good is shaped by other, often more dominant, stakeholders in healthcare: governmental institutions, professional experts, scientists, and private industry—the latter being a focal point of concern for this current volume.European Commission Horizon 202

Digital Health’s Impact on Integrated Care, Carer Empowerment and Patient-Centeredness for Persons Living With Dementia

E-health or digital health technologies endeavour to connect key stakeholders and thereby lay the foundation for better integrated as well as potentially more patient-centered care. However, despite the promise of empowerment, efficiency and value, digital health has yet to become part of the daily lives of the people who care for persons living with dementi

Emergent leadership in online communities: an interactive process of co-influencing

We propose a theoretical approach informed by a power-in-practice perspective that allows us to examine the emergence of leadership in online communities. We theorize leadership emergence as a process of co-influencing that is constituted by forces of ‘pushing’ and ‘pulling’ different enactments of power that are formative of communal interactions. More specifically we identify three pathways for emergent leadership based on different modes of community influence. These insights are based on a detailed exploration of interactions in one particular online community #WeAreNotWaiting, offering distinct contributions to the literature on leadership emergence, particularly in online communities without formal roles and hierarchies

Boundary resource interactions in solution networks

Purpose – This study aims to explore the interactions between two different and potentially complementary boundary resources in coordinating solution networks in a digital platform context: boundary spanners (those individuals who span interorganizational boundaries) and boundary interfaces (the devices that help coordinate interfirm relationships, e.g. electronic data interchanges, algorithms or chatbots). Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a multiple case study of three firms using digital platforms to coordinate solution networks in the information communication technology and lighting facility industries. Data were collected from 30 semi-structured interviews, which are complemented by secondary data. Findings – As task complexity increases, smarter digital interfaces are adopted. When the intelligence level of interfaces is low or moderate, they are only used as tools by boundary spanners or to support boundary spanners’ functions. When the intelligence level of interfaces is high or very high, boundary spanners design the interfaces and let them perform tasks autonomously. They are also sometimes employed to complement interfaces’ technological limitations and customers’ limited user ability. Research limitations/implications – The industry contexts of the cases may influence the results. Qualitative case data has limited generalizability. Practical implications – This study offers a practical tool for solution providers to effectively deploy boundary employees and digital technologies to offer diverse customized solutions simultaneously. Originality – This study contributes to the solution business literature by putting forward a framework of boundary resource interactions in coordinating solution networks in a digital platform context. It contributes to the boundary spanning literature by revealing the shifting functions of boundary spanners and boundary interfaces

Breaching, Bridging, and Bonding: Interweaving Pathways of Social-symbolic Work in a Flanked Healthcare Movement

This article explores how heterogeneous and distributed forms of social-symbolic work combine over time to yield synergistic relationships that precipitate institutional change. We study a collective effort by patient activists to change the technological and regulatory standards of Type-1 diabetes care. We offer contributions to radical flank theory by conceptualizing radical and moderate flanks as dynamic and overlapping pathways of action rather than fixed actor positions, and we show how a medial ‘bonding’ pathway can provide important social glue to connect the radical and moderate flanks. While in our case the material and discursive ‘hacking’ work in the breaching pathway disrupted institutions, triggered technology innovation, and created momentum for change, material and relational ‘bridging’ embedded these efforts into existing institutional structures and longer-term innovation trajectories. Values and amplification work in the bonding pathway served to keep the two other pathways aligned over time. By addressing how a complex social problem – patient-centric innovation - may be affected through heterogeneous social-symbolic work that leads to institutional accommodation, our study holds considerable policy and societal relevance.European Commission Horizon 2020European Research CouncilOpen access funding provided by IReLEarly view, to check citing and date details in 6

Genetic research and the collective good: participants as leaders to reconcile individual and public interests

New YorkThis paper problematises the notions of public or common good as weighed against individual sovereignty in the context of medical research by focusing on genetic research. We propose the notion of collective good as the good of the particular collective in which the research was conducted. We conducted documentary and interview-based research with participant representatives and research leaders concerned with participant involvement in leading genetic research projects and around two recent genetic data controversies: the case of the UK Wellcome Sanger Institute, accused of planning unauthorised commercialisation of African DNA samples, and the case of the company Genuity Science, which planned genetic research on brain tumour samples in Ireland with no explicit patient consent. We advocate for greater specificity in circumscribing the collective to which genetic research relates and for greater efforts in including representatives of this collective as research coleaders in order to enable a more inclusive framing of the good arising from such research. Such community-based participant cogovernance and coleadership in genetic research is vital especially when minorities or vulnerable groups are involved, and it centrally requires community capacity building to help collectives articulate their own notions of the collective good.European Commission Horizon 202

Leaning in or falling over? Epistemological liminality and the knowledges that make a market

This article describes the experiences of two market studies scholars who became involved in an Applied Research Centre aimed at developing a societally valuable market in digital health–an experience that ended in failure. We introduce the concept of epistemological liminality as a theoretical tool to problematise our own positionality as ‘market experts’ in this failed academic-industry-government collaboration around a concerned market. Liminality involved entering a transitional space–time in which our academic knowledge as market studies scholars was suspended, but where we failed to successfully move into a new epistemic space of ‘applied market studies’. This state of suspension–and frustration–is a cautionary tale for the difficulties of linking different (and often contradictory) epistemic communities that meet in applied research. We stop short of providing a moral to this market (non)performance tale, but we do highlight the need for openness and debate on the knowledges that come together to make a market in such collaborations.To check date and citing details in 6