Chris Miles

Chris Miles
The Marketing of
Service-Dominant
Logic
A Rhetorical Approach
The Marketing of Service-Dominant Logic
Chris Miles
The Marketing of
Service-Dominant
Logic
A Rhetorical Approach
Chris Miles
Faculty of Media & Communication
Bournemouth University
Bournemouth, UK
ISBN 978-3-031-46509-3 ISBN 978-3-031-46510-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46510-9
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For Şebnem
Contents
1 S-D Logic as Persuasive Discourse 1
2 Rhetorical Analysis and Marketing Texts 23
3 Rhetoric and the Agonistic Moment of S-D Logic 69
4 The Rhetorical Evolution of S-D Logic127
5 A Rhetorical Analysis of sdlogic.net169
6 The Rhetoric of Emerging Systems199
I ndex247
vii
List of Tables
Table 4.1 Original FPs (Vargo & Lusch, 2004) 140

Table 4.2 FPs 1st revision (Vargo & Lusch, 2006) 141
Table 4.3 FPs 2nd revision (Vargo & Lusch, 2008a) 141
Table 4.4 FPs 3rd revision (Lusch & Vargo, 2014) 141
Table 4.5 FPs 4th revision (Vargo & Lusch, 2016) 142
Table 4.6 FPs 5th revision (Vargo et al., 2020) 155
ix
1
S-D Logic as Persuasive Discourse
S-D Logic: Its Status as Marketing

For marketing scholars, Service-Dominant logic (S-D logic) would seem
to need little introduction. At the time of writing, the Journal of Marketing
paper that introduced the logic, Vargo and Lusch (2004), has 21,585
citations on Google Scholar, making it the most cited piece of marketing
writing ever. This is extraordinary considering that it is essentially a
historically-oriented conceptual paper in an academic discipline that
most of the time pays little attention to its history and conceptual devel-
opment. The citation count for the 2004 foundational paper of S-D logic
reflects the tremendous amount of interest that the concepts introduced
in it have engendered in its audience of marketing scholars. Importantly,
though, S-D logic is not represented in just this single paper—Vargo and
Lusch (and various co-authors and collaborators) have been involved in a
continual evolution of their logic that has resulted in a stream of well-
cited papers in key journals in the discipline, as well as an edited collec-
tion (Lusch & Vargo, 2006), a monograph (Lusch & Vargo, 2014), and
a Sage Handbook of Service-Dominant Logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2019). In
addition, there have been many conferences and fora organised to discuss
and contribute to that evolution, as well as special issues in journals, and
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1

C. Miles, The Marketing of Service-Dominant Logic,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46510-9_1
2 C. Miles
numerous book chapters discussing aspects of the S-D logic. Vargo and
Lusch have also maintained a long-running website (sdlogic.net) that has
been instrumental in acting as a depository of papers, calls for papers,
news, and updates. At the same time, the foundational 2004 paper con-
tinues to exert influence and rack up citations, even though the formula-
tion of the S-D logic that it carries is no longer current, superseded by the
many later iterations of its ‘foundational premises’ and shifts in frame-
work emphasis and lexicon.
In this study I will be exploring what might constitute the persuasive
strength of S-D logic, looking into how both the foundational paper and
many of the key later ‘improvements’ have been positioned in order to be
as compelling as possible. One might, of course, simply argue that S-D
logic’s success is a function of it conceptual ‘correctness’—it is cited so
well and given the attention it has been because it is empirically ‘true’.
But S-D logic’s strength has never been grounded in empirical evidence.
It describes a theory, or pre-theory, or mind-set, or proto-paradigm, or
framework that has been constructed from a critical consideration of the
historical marketing literature. It rests upon matters of definition, lexi-
con, and concept—how we see ‘marketing’ and the relationships that
make it up. In such a context, ‘true’ or ‘correct’ are not appropriate
terms—‘making sense’, ‘useful’, ‘insightful’, ‘illuminating’, ‘enhancing
understanding’, these are the sorts of valuations that we might instead
expect of a conceptual logic. Tregua et al.’s (2021) citation analysis of
Vargo and Lusch (2004) demonstrates the ways in which the founda-
tional article has “revolutionized service research; inspired and instigated
fruitful theoretical discussion and debates in the field of service; was
applied to propagate and pollinate a variety of academic fields; and is
universally recognized outside the scope of service, marketing, and busi-
ness studies as a synonym for value co-creation, user involvement and
customer interaction” (p. 594). The central concepts of the Service-
Dominant logic have resonance for those working within service research,
but are also useful for those in other areas of marketing and even outside
marketing. Yet, as Vargo and Lusch (2004) demonstrate themselves,
those individual concepts are not new—the paper is a long argument that
uncovers the connections between a number of core ideas that are then
presented as indicating an emerging logic in that literature. The success of
Vargo and Lusch (2004) lies not in those individual concepts (co-creation,
service as the basis of all exchange, the distinction between operand and
operant resources, that a service view of marketing is relational and
customer-oriented, that firms can make value propositions but it is cus-
tomers who make value). It lies in how they are put together, how they
are persuasively argued for as a set of interconnected concepts that
together represent an emergent logic that will save marketing thought
from the fragmentation and redundancy that it is threatened by.
In other words, the power of S-D logic comes from the way that it
packages a number of concepts together in a form and narrative that is
persuasive to its audience—and it is this ‘packaging’ that constitutes the
object of analysis in this study. The approach that I will be taking will be
to treat this ‘packaging’ as rhetoric, because, within the Western humani-
ties tradition that is exactly what we should call it. Rhetoric describes the
ability “to induce or to increase the mind’s adherence to the theses” pre-
sented for assent (Perelman & Olbrecths-Tyteca, 1971, p. 45), or, in
Aristotle’s classic formulation, the practice of rhetoric centres around “the
detection of the persuasive aspects of each matter” (1991, p. 70). In the
matter of marketing scholarship, the persuasive aspects may reside in a
variety of locations, from word choice, metaphor choice, framing and
re-framing, defining and re-defining, all the way to strategic characterisa-
tions of alternative scholarly positions, appeals to authority, appeals to
popularity, and even temporary destabilisation of the reader’s certainty—
the gamut, indeed, of traditional rhetorical techniques. My argument
will be that marketing scholarship is no different from any other form of
persuasive discourse in its use of such strategies. While still a somewhat
unusual perspective within marketing thinking, the rhetorical lens is
increasingly being adopted to aid in the understanding of both marketing
work and scholarship (Brown, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2010; Hackley, 2001,
2003; Laufer & Paradeise, 2016; Miles, 2010, 2013, 2014a, 2017, 2018,
2019; Miles & Nilsson, 2018; Nilsson, 2006, 2010, 2019; Tonks, 2002).
In Chap. 2, I will explore the conceptual background to, and strategies
involved in, the analysis of discourse using a rhetorical approach.
However, the astute reader will notice that the title of this book is “The
Marketing of Service-Dominant Logic: A Rhetorical Approach”,
4 C. Miles
explicitly drawing a comparison between marketing and rhetoric. What

does it mean to make such a connection?
In Miles (2018) I have argued that marketing is fundamentally a rhe-
torical activity, defining it in the following way (p. 207):
Marketing provides intermediary services to facilitate the continuing

exchange of attention and regard between firm/client and stakeholders. It
seeks to manage and direct this exchange through an appreciation of the
changing rational and irrational motivations of the firm and stakeholders,
using these as resources for the construction of both planned and impro-
vised persuasive interactions in agonistic environments.
Marketing is a process that directs, or seeks to manage the exchange of

attention and regard (regard being the value afforded through attention)
and it does this through inculcating persuasive interactions in environ-
ments that are characterised by some form of competition, struggle, or
agon. Now, this is not a popular definition of marketing, so although it
makes marketing a rhetorical practice, that is not much of a convincing
case. So let us, instead, consider how S-D logic itself defines marketing
and investigate how it, too, might be describing a rhetorical practice.
In Vargo and Lusch (2004), we read that “the customer is always a co-
producer” and “the enterprise can only make value propositions” (p. 11).
These are Foundational Premises (FP) 6 and 7. Now, as mentioned above,
the FPs have undergone revision and restructuring over the years and
these two FPs have been re-worded in the evolved S-D logic lexicon into
“value is cocreated by multiple actors, always including the beneficiary”
and “actors cannot deliver value but can participate in the creation of and
offering of value propositions” (Lusch & Vargo, 2019, p. 13). In order to
be on as solid ground for argumentation as possible, let us just consider
the 2019 wordings at this stage. So, value is offered in a proposition, and
that proposition is co-created between actors. What might a “proposi-
tion” be? Well, Lusch and Vargo (2019) explain that “value propositions
are assurances of potential value or benefits” (p. 13). And, of course, mar-
keters will be familiar with the term proposition, because it is a compo-
nent in what we might call a ‘legacy’ term from late 1950s advertising,
the Unique Selling Proposition, first introduced to the industry by
Rosser Reeves when he was working at the Ted Bates agency (Haygood,
2016). The USP (often misunderstood as meaning unique selling point
by those with a poorer familiarity with advertising history) is defined in
Reeves’ (1961) book, Reality in Advertising. There he glosses the idea of
the proposition as an “admonition”, where the advertisement says to the
reader “‘Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit’” (p. 38).
A proposition, then, is a promise of a particular exchange—if you buy
this from us, it will give you this particular benefit. As Reeves pointed
out, this had been received wisdom in advertising agencies for decades
previously—what he brought to the formula was the idea of finding the
unique benefit in a product and then selling it hard. However, the core of
the USP is still that basic promise of exchange value. Let’s skip a head a
little to the next iteration of the marketing proposition concept, and that
is Lanning and Michael’s (1988) introduction of the actual value proposi-
tion, in the context of promoting their vision of all businesses as ‘value
delivery systems’. Their exposition runs as follows: “A business unit prom-
ises customers some value, a combination of benefit and price. It thus
offers a value proposition. We believe that behind any winning strategy
stands a superior value proposition” (p. 3). When compared to Reeves’
USP, the Lanning and Michaels value proposition has a different focus,
particularly as it is so important for them to think of price and benefit as
the two components of value. The idea of benefit is carried over, clearly,
but uniqueness has been replaced by price as the second element of the
promise, or offer, that needs to be made to the customer. Lanning and
Michaels (1988) are suggesting that if the customer thinks that the com-
bination of the benefit they are being offered and the price that they are
being asked to pay is attractive to them (is perceived as superior com-
pared to competitors) then they will be convinced by the proposition and
make the purchase. Now, circling back to Lusch and Vargo’s (2019) for-
mulation, we can see that we still have the concept of benefit at the core
of their thinking about the offer of value—“value propositions are assur-
ances of potential value or benefits” (p. 13). However, one of the main
changes we can see here is the assertion that “actors cannot deliver value
but can participate in the creation and offering of value propositions”
(ibid.). Who delivers value, then? Well, no one—because value cannot be
delivered—it can only be determined. As FP10 states, “value is always
6 C. Miles
uniquely and phenomenologically determined by the beneficiary” (Lusch

& Vargo, 2019, p. 15). Value is assessed, or determined by the actor who
benefits from it, and that assessment will be “holistic”, reflecting the
“experiential nature” (ibid.) of value. So, to review, let’s say we are IKEA,
and we are marketing a new sofa. As a company we will try to construct
a value proposition for the sofa that we feel will offer, promise, assure
possible beneficiaries of the holistic value cluster they will experience
when they exchange money for the provision of the sofa and the value it
promises (functional benefits, experience with friends sitting on the sofa
and streaming films, or whatever experience we think might be most
resonant with the prospective beneficiaries). We cannot provide that
value—actually deliver it to the beneficiary—instead our proposition can
help to create its possibility. If we propose that the prospective beneficia-
ries might find it the perfect sofa to doze away on during a lazy afternoon
and then if the beneficiary actually uses the sofa for that purpose, we have
co-created that value with them. They have experienced it (and so they
have determined the value), of course, but its instantiation has been co-
created with us. Now, if we begin to add in other actors into this very
simple scenario we can begin to see how co-creation of value can become
a lot more complicated. Let’s say that at the same time as we communi-
cate our value proposition via an advertising campaign, the online IKEA
fan community begin to get hold of the sofa and start posting memes
about how the images we have used in the campaign make the sofa look
‘like a dead penguin’. Now the community are also co-creating the value
proposition with IKEA—and those members of the community who
have bought the sofa are experiencing value from it in a way that we at
IKEA never suggested (as a source of inspiration for memes and commu-
nity content creation, and also therefore as a tool for furthering their own
identity creation online). But we do have an option, as a brand, to join in
an evolving co-creation effort with the community, adopting and adapt-
ing the ‘dead penguin’ meme in our marcoms messaging around the sofa,
integrating these elements into our value proposition as we go forward.
And this is just a snapshot, as it were, into the dynamic, evolving co-
creation of the value proposition—an evolution that might well span
years of branded and community-generated content and messaging.
But where is the rhetoric, you ask? It is right there in the very nature of
the value proposition—the provision of a compelling offer that can move
a beneficiary enough to help them co-create the value that they experi-
ence from our brand and its services. The creation of a value proposition
is founded on the creation of “narratives or stories of value potential”
(Lusch & Vargo, 2019, p. 13). Those narratives might focus around func-
tional benefits, experiential benefits, identify formation and extension
benefits, or transcending benefits—but in the end the value proposition
is a (co-created) narrative that lays out the offer of potential value. It
needs to be compelling, it needs to be resonant with the actors whom we
are discoursing with, it needs to give them tools of the imagination (met-
aphors, interpretations, illustrations, etc.), so that the value potential the
brand offers can be realised through their experience. As I will demon-
strate in more depth in Chap. 2, this is the domain of rhetoric—fashion-
ing a proposition that will move an audience of prospective beneficiaries,
that will bring to their minds’ eyes a vision of what might be, a vision of
value potential. They have to be, in one way or another, attracted to that
vision of value potential—attracted enough to ‘buy’ the offer. So value
propositions have to be attractive offers to the beneficiaries (Frow et al.,
2014; Frow & Payne, 2011; Skålén et al., 2014), that engage those benefi-
ciaries and lead to long-term co-creating relationships with them (Payne
& Frow, 2014).
The one word that the literature on S-D logic’s approach to the value
proposition does not like to use when describing them is the one that the
discipline of rhetoric itself has had some problems with in the latter half
of the twentieth century onward—persuasion. Rhetorical studies has
slowly moved away from the Greco-Roman Western rhetoric tradition’s
definitional focus on persuasion, using such alternative formulations as
“adherence” (Perelman & Olbrecths-Tyteca, 1971, p. 45), “inducing
cooperation” (Burke, 1969, p. 43), the ‘countering’ of alternative descrip-
tions (Potter, 2005), or even simply the capacity that a human artefact
has “to move someone else” (Ott & Dickinson, 2013, p. 2). Much of this
conceptual shifting has been motivated by the understanding that not all
suasory discourse occurs in the easily identifiable realms of political
assemblies, legal proceedings, and promotional campaigns. Some of it
has also been motivated by a desire to move beyond what might be seen
8 C. Miles
as the implicit violence of the Western rhetorical tradition, the idea that
in seeking to change others we are seeking to dominate them. As Foss and
Griffin (1995) argue in their groundbreaking article on the prospect for a
feminist, invitational, rhetoric, “the act of changing others not only
establishes the power of the rhetor over others but also devalues the lives
and perspectives of those others” (p. 3). The idea that marketing has been
largely focused on changing others’ minds, and often using heavy-handed,
hard-sell tactics to do so, is one that Vargo and Lusch (2004) make some
reference to in the foundational presentation of the implications of the
emerging service-dominant logic, where they note that one implication
of the S-D perspective is that “promotion will need to become a com-
munication process characterized by dialogue, asking and answering
questions” (p. 13). They further state that “the normative goal should not
be communication to the market but developing ongoing communica-
tion processes, or dialogues, with micromarkets, ideally markets of one”
(ibid.). This, they argue, would need to lead to a shift of focus in market-
ing education, where “limited-focus, promotional courses such as adver-
tising” would be replaced by integrated marketing communications units
that would “emphasize both the means and the mechanisms for initiating
and maintaining a continuing dialogue with the customer and for
enhancing the relationship by using tools such as branding” (p. 14).
Much of this commentary from Vargo and Lusch is grounded in their
referencing of Duncan and Moriarty’s (1998) study advancing a
communication- based marketing model, where they argue that “the
notion of persuasion as traditionally used in short-term, transaction mar-
keting is manipulative” and that although it has “an important role in
marketing, when persuasion is foremost it places undue emphasis on
transactions and the short term” (p. 2). What is required, according to
Duncan and Moriarty (1998), is an approach to building “interactive
relationships” with customers that are based on listening just as much
as saying.
This association of persuasion with manipulation is one that has
dogged both marketing and rhetoric, and I have written on the signifi-
cance of this for both disciplines in other places (Miles, 2013, 2018). The
fact that marketing can involve manipulation and deceit, and continues
to do so every day, is easily seen by a perusal of the recent rulings of the
Advertising Standards Authority, the United Kingdom’s body for the

(self-)regulation of the marketing communications industry (https://
www.asa.org.uk/codes-and-rulings/rulings.html). In its rolling summary
of weekly adjudications, we can read of misleading and socially irrespon-
sible claims made by brands big and small. It is no wonder that scholars
of marketing have sought to distance their work and their theory build-
ing from the idea of persuasion.
However, if we take stock of rhetoric’s own move away from the nega-
tive connotations of the ‘persuasion’ word, to contextualise it and broaden
its scope, we can recognise that seeking to draw someone’s attention
towards an offer that has been created in collaboration with actors
throughout the value exchange system, including the beneficiaries, seek-
ing to vivify that offer through the presentation of a narrative or story, a
narrative that might dynamically respond to changes in actor require-
ments, might be persuasive but not manipulative. As we shall see in
Chap. 2, even in the classical Western tradition of rhetoric, the rhetor is
engaged in a dynamic relationship with their audience, a relationship that
is very much dependent on understanding what the audience wants,
what they value, and responding to that understanding in an improvisa-
tory manner (the element of kairos, as it is called). The rhetor co-creates
their argument, their proposition, along with the audience.
Just as our perusal of the Advertising Standards Authority’s rulings can
make us aware that the days of manipulative marketing practices are still
very much with us, so a perusal of the Effie awards site (https://effiorg.
com/caselibraryhome) provides us with many examples of marketing
campaigns that are not misleading, manipulative or irresponsible and are
also highly effective for increasing engagement with brand narratives that
are offers of potential value. So, to say it again, marketing can be persua-
sive but not manipulative. If we have to use words like ‘resonant’, ‘com-
pelling’, ‘attractive’, and ‘engaging’—instead of ‘persuasive’—to describe
what the value proposition should be to be effective, then that is fine.
Indeed, it is a perfect example of the rhetorical strategies that we build
around word choice, something very important in S-D logic’s rhetoric, as
I will show in this study. But what the expanded, contemporary under-
standings of rhetoric give us is the realisation that all of those things are
rhetorical, they help to move actors from one place of understanding to
10 C. Miles
another, they help to change the way they experience something, and
therefore the value that they create from it.
A final comment on the S-D logic perspective on value propositions is
worth making. Kaaretemo et al. (2019) make the sage point that value
propositions “reduce uncertainty by signalling value expectations and
possibilities” (p. 529). This is a tremendously important function of the
value proposition for all actors in a value exchange system, and for the
beneficiary it can be absolutely crucial in assisting them in realising the
full holistic value of an exchange. Rhetoric, similarly, seeks to reduce
uncertainty around value expectations. Consigny (1974) describes the
rhetorical situation as “an indeterminate context marked by troublesome
disorder which the rhetor must structure so as to disclose and formulate
problems” (p. 178). The rhetor deals with ‘situational incoherencies’ that
need to be made coherent for them and the audience by transforming
them into problems that have solutions, so that the disorder that impinges
on their “form of life” can be resolved. Marketing and rhetoric, then, can
both be seen as working to bring certainty to stakeholders in disordered
or uncertain contexts. As I will show in this study, the idea of bringing
order out of chaos, of identifying emergent structure in an environment
of fragmentation, of providing a transcending solution, is at the core of
S-D logic’s own value proposition.
Which brings us back to the issue of what it means to study the ‘mar-
keting’ of S-D logic and what rhetoric has to do with it. As I hope will be
clear by now, this study intends to look at S-D logic as a rhetorical arte-
fact. In doing so, I will be seeking to explore the persuasive (or, if you
will, compelling, engaging, attractive) nature of Vargo and Lusch’s for-
mulation and presentation of the logic over its evolution. In traditional
marketing communications terms, I want to investigate its packaging, its
copywriting, its promotion, its publicity, and even (if I might be allowed
to use such an antiquated phrase) its product lifecycle. Or, in words that
perhaps makes more sense to me as both a marketing and rhetoric scholar,
I want to investigate the (co)creation of its value proposition(s). What is
the narrative, or story, of potential value that S-D logic offers to market-
ing academics? How is it put together, how is made compelling, how is it
brought to life in the imagination of its readers so that its offer makes
sense and promises a possibility of value that resonates and engages? And
how does that story change over time, as we would expect dynamic, inter-
active propositions to do? All of these questions are perfect questions for
rhetorical analysis to help answer and they are all questions that get to the
heart of how S-D logic is marketed.
Tadajewski (2006) argues that “the history of marketing theory is tes-
tament to the contestation that occurs between rival paradigmatic com-
munities competing to position their paradigm as the dominant discourse
of time” (p. 164), and he links this to insights from Peter and Oslen’s
(1983) exploration of how science can be seen “as a special case of mar-
keting—the marketing of ideas” (p. 111). Tadajewski (2006) describes
how “far from intellectual debate being a forum where ideas are judged
solely on their merit, the production and effective marketing of theory
necessitates that theory is marketed to negotiate the practices of exclusion
which admit only certain forms of research into the canon, while pushing
other material to the margins of marketing theory” (p. 186). It might
seem somewhat curious to consider S-D logic, which has been so success-
ful, as a theory that has needed to be marketed in order to negotiate
“practices of exclusion”. After all, it was only a couple of years before their
submission of the original manuscript that became Vargo and Lusch
(2004) that Lusch was himself editor of the Journal of Marketing. How
excluded could a paper from them be? Of course, those familiar with the
history of the manuscript know that it had a tortuous journey through
the review process, spanning four years. There are a variety of reasons why
the arguments espoused in Vargo and Lusch (2004) might be considered
by reviewers and editors as constituting positions that needed to be
excluded from the canon or pushed to the peripheries. A significant part
of the compelling narrative that the paper provides, as we shall see in
Chap. 3, is built upon the idea that there is a new emerging way of think-
ing in marketing scholarship, the service-dominant perspective, that has
not yet been recognised as such. The paper calls for the revision of basic
understandings, the general marketing lexicon, the way we practice mar-
keting and the way we teach it. It calls for the realisation that the domi-
nant marketing paradigm, the “traditional goods-centered paradigm”, is
potentially going to be replaced by the “emerging service-centered logic”
(Vargo & Lusch, 2004, p. 15). All those scholars who have made careers
based upon a view of marketing organised around the manufacturing of
12 C. Miles
products, of goods, of stuff, are going to be resistant to the prospect of an

emerging, replacing paradigm of marketing based upon the premise that,
actually, “the application of specialized skills and knowledge is the funda-
mental unit of exchange” (p. 6) and that “money, goods, organizations,
and vertical marketing systems are only the vehicles” (p. 8) for that
exchange. It is inevitable that such a paper (and the continuing develop-
ment of the logic that spins out from that paper) will require concen-
trated ‘marketing’, in Tadajewski’s (2006) terms.
The strategic thinking that went into the authoring, the revising, and
the presentation in its eventual issue of publication, of Vargo and Lusch
(2004) has been commented upon by the authors at various points and I
will be examining some of this in detail in Chap. 3 when I examine the
role of agon, or creative struggle, in the rhetoric of the foundational paper.
However, in regard to the broader issue of how the paper functions as
marketing, it is illuminating to examine a chapter Vargo contributed to
Stewart and Ladik’s (2019) edited collection, How to Get Published in the
Best Marketing Journals. First, let us just pause and consider the title of
the edited collection as well as what the existence of such a book says
about the process of submission, review, and publication in marketing
scholarship. The title implies the reality of the scholarly publishing sys-
tem—that it is a highly competitive one, that is not easy to understand,
and that is far away from the ideal of an “intellectual forum where ideas
are judged solely on their merit” (to remind ourselves of Tadajewski’s,
2006, words). The book itself collects together the advice of many mar-
keting journal editors, each one focusing on a slightly different aspect of
the process. The opening chapter, by the editors themselves, presents the
results of a survey of 104 of the “strongest, most experienced reviewers”
(Ladik & Stewart, 2019) (nominated by their journal editors) of market-
ing journals. Crucially, the advisory quote from one of the responding
reviewers that they choose to open the chapter with, will immediately
ring a resonant chord with us: “‘The (most) common mistake is not to
‘tell a story’, but only assemble different related parts. ‘telling a good
story’ means to critically analyze what has been done before and demon-
strate convincingly why something is changing’” (p. 4). Reviewers (and
readers) need convincing and the best way to do that is to make sure you
are telling a story. The importance of a persuasive narrative also forms the
conclusion to their chapter, as they reproduce the voices of reviewers who

state that the most common mistake they see in manuscripts is the
“‘absence of an overarching theoretically anchored conceptual story’”, or
in the words of another, the paucity of “‘a forceful compelling narrative’”,
or in the words of yet another, “‘the lack of a strong narrative arch’”
(p. 12). Stories that are strong, forceful, and compelling—just the sort of
advice one would expect from a brand manager to junior marketers, just
the sort of advice we have had from Vargo and Lusch concerning what
the value proposition should be. And just the sort of advice that the
whole history of Western rhetoric would give for anyone wanting to
move an audience to see things in the same way that they do.
Vargo’s (2019) piece for the edited collection is entitled, ‘The service-
dominant logic journey: from conceptualization to publication’, and it
contains much detail outlining the origins of the ideas in Vargo and
Lusch (2004) and how the authors managed to navigate the often contra-
dictory demands of the (eventually, six) reviewers. Vargo’s (2019) chapter
highlights the co-creation that can occur at the nexus of manuscript
authors, reviewers, and editors, and despite the “painful”, “extremely
frustrating” (p. 195) review process, he is clear that the eventual paper,
conceptually and structurally, is better for it. He also underlines the
insight of Tadajewski’s (2006) view regarding the dissemination of mar-
keting theory being a struggle between new and entrenched paradigms.
One of the significant ways that Vargo says both he and Lusch learned to
deal with appearing to be “stepping on [the] personal paradigmatic foun-
dations” of the reviewers was to change the phrasings that they used so
that they appeared less threatening to the old guard—“changing our
positioning to one of capturing and accelerating a change that we saw
taking place, making it less confrontational” (p. 195). This is a rhetorical
strategy, focused around using word choice to resonate in an appropriate
way with the audience, and it is framed in the marketing terminology of
‘positioning’. In the final words of his piece, Vargo (2019) advises how
the contentiousness of an idea can be best served by “turning confronta-
tion into a story of coalescence and convergence” (p. 196), admirably
summing up the rhetorical advantage gained from pitching something as
unifying rather than divisive—a major point of S-D logic rhetorical strat-
egy that we will return to many times in this study.
14 C. Miles
So, Vargo himself, as well as the combined voices of the reviewers of

scholarly marketing journals, make it clear to us that the production and
presentation of marketing thought is bound up in ‘marketing’ consider-
ations, by which we all mean the weaving of compelling narratives that
resonate with the audience. It is that weaving of the compelling S-D logic
narrative, from its first presentation and through its (still) evolving revi-
sions and transformations, that I will be seeking to explore using the tools
of the rhetorical tradition—tools that we all use as researchers, scholars,
and teachers, but that we often do not give ourselves the space to con-
sider, reflect upon, and improve. The S-D logic is a rich example of a
successful scholarly marketing discourse, one that has marketed itself
through a careful, evolving (and co-created) consideration of the compel-
ling, engaging narrative that is its value proposition. We can learn a lot
through an equally careful consideration of how that narrative has been
made compelling, engaging, and, well, persuasive.
A Few Words About Scope

S-D logic, as indicated by the impressive citation count for Vargo and
Lusch (2004) that I open this chapter with, has given birth to a truly vast
literature. It is not my intention to exhaustively examine that literature,
even if such a thing were humanly possible. As I will outline in Chap. 2,
rhetorical analysis requires a ‘deep attention’ to a discourse and the size of
the general S-D logic discourse militates against a thorough rhetorical
reading of it. I am sure that software-aided analysis of rhetorical strategies
will improve markedly in the future, but at the moment, the sort of rhe-
torical analysis that I will be undertaking entails human-powered close
reading. This is a research tradition that is not very common in the social
sciences, particularly in marketing scholarship, and I will endeavour to
unpack what it involves in the next chapter. The consequence is that this
study restricts itself to work by Vargo and Lusch. Now, even then, we are
dealing with a large number of articles, chapters, a couple of edited col-
lections and a monograph and we would also have to consider the large
amount of work that Vargo and Lusch have then separately written with
other co-authors on subjects that are core and tangential to the
service-dominant perspective. So, for the majority of the time I will be

looking at the core S-D logic literature written by Vargo and Lusch (as
co-authors or as solo authors)—the foundational paper, the various chap-
ters and articles that have presented the revisions and new perspectives, as
well as the chapters and book sections that re-formulate or re-present
them. There will be a number of exceptions to this, where I will introduce
either precursor literature that can provide insight into rhetorical ele-
ments in the core S-D logic literature or where work by researchers within
the field of S-D logic can help to illuminate certain key points in the core
work by Vargo and Lusch. It is important to realise, in keeping with the
axioms of S-D logic, that value is always co-created and there is much
collaboration and discussion within the wide S-D logic literature that has
influenced the evolving formulation and emphases of the core premises
and axioms. Where that collaboration and discussion has a bearing on
the rhetorical elements of the core discourse, I have endeavoured to
address it.
It is also important to point out that the purpose if this study is not to
deconstruct the conceptual framework of S-D logic. While I will (as I
have already, above) often interrogate S-D logic concepts in the course of
this study, this will only be in order to elucidate, contextualise, or high-
light the rhetorical strategies that are being used to make those concepts
compelling. Many of those concepts (such as the co-creation of value by
multiple actors, the value proposition as something that offers value but
cannot deliver it, the idea that value is uniquely determined by the ben-
eficiary) have very close relationships with rhetorical concepts and
approaches and I hope by the end of this study the reader will be able to
appreciate the conceptual similarities. However, this is not a book about
S-D logic; it is a study of the rhetorical strategies in the marketing of that
logic. The same is true for the oppositional literature to S-D logic. Since
the publication of the foundational paper in 2004, there has been a small
but steady stream of research that has questioned, critiqued, or argued
against the foundational premises, or the reasoning that leads to them
(see Tregua et al., 2021, for a discussion of the citation significance of this
section of the literature). While, from the perspective of the rhetorical
analysis of argumentation, these studies provide great interest, in the
interests of space I have elected to only engage with those few that have
16 C. Miles
provoked some form of direct response from Vargo and Lusch or have
appeared to influence aspects of S-D logic’s development.
The Structure of the Study

The next chapter, Chap. 2, examines what it means to perform a rhetori-
cal analysis, particularly of texts that exist within a, broadly, social sci-
ences context. I provide a brief background to the Western rhetorical
tradition and then investigate how the analysis of artefacts with a rhetori-
cal lens fits within the close reading tradition of humanities scholarship. I
then ask why it might be important to close read marketing scholarship
and discuss the role that attention plays in our relationship with the key
presentation of concepts in our discipline. After reflecting upon the sig-
nificance of non-Western rhetorical traditions in the examination of S-D
logic, Chap. 2 then continues with an in-depth consideration of the prin-
cipal elements of the rhetorical analysis toolbox in preparation for
Chap. 3.
Chapter 3, the longest in the study, is entirely devoted to a detailed
analysis of the rhetorical strategies of Vargo and Lusch (2004), the foun-
dational paper of S-D logic. It frames the paper within the idea of agon,
or creative struggle, exploring how the presentation of the paper along-
side commentaries from both supportive and problematizing authority
figures from marketing scholarship helped to generate an agon that ampli-
fied the paper’s significance and helped to pitch its value proposition
more engagingly. The chapter probes the way that the foundational paper
uses history to construct a persuasive narrative of inevitability, salvation,
and unity—and argues that this is the site of its real value proposition. I
also connect the way that the paper deals with issues of definition and
lexicon with the rhetorical concepts of stasis and persuasive framing. After
analysing the rhetorical role of scientism in the generation of ethos in
Vargo and Lusch (2004), I reconstruct the rhetorical argumentation of
the paper in order to reveal the value proposition that lies at its heart.
Having examined Vargo and Lusch (2004), the study moves on to
trace the rhetorical components in the evolution of the logic since that
foundational paper. Chapter 4 deals specifically with the revisions of the
Foundational Premises, seeking to interrogate the nature of revision as a

rhetorical strategy. It starts by establishing the trajectory of revision as
originating back before Vargo and Lusch (2004), particularly in Kiel
et al. (1992). The chapter then continues by closely examining the
changes in lexicon and presentation that have been effected on the
Foundational Premises and the (later) Axioms, attempting to uncover the
rhetorical ramifications of those changes. In doing so, I consider whether
the central value proposition of S-D logic is being changed as part of
these revisions. Finally, I consider the claim, often made by Vargo and
Lusch, that S-D logic is an ‘open source’ project—I examine what this
might mean rhetorically and how it contributes to the compelling narra-
tive of the value proposition at the heart of the logic.
In Chap. 5, we step away from the traditional texts of marketing schol-
arship and consider sdlogic.net, the website run by Vargo and Lusch since
late 2005 to help promote their service-dominant perspective. I open the
chapter with a consideration of the benefits and challenges that come
with rhetorically analysing digital discourse. I then move through a dis-
cussion of the structure and content of the site and the way that both
contribute to rhetorical argumentation around conceptual credibility,
community strength, and relevance. This chapter deals, by necessity, with
some of the visual rhetoric that has grown up around S-D logic, particu-
larly the transcending spiral and the adoption of the Maori Koru symbol.
The final chapter of the study, Chap. 6, looks at the evolution of S-D
logic from a rather different perspective from that adopted in Chap. 4.
The adoption of a systems perspective for S-D logic, formally announced
in Vargo and Lusch (2011), is a critical inflection point in the develop-
ment of the logic. This chapter interrogates the rhetorical significance of
systems theory for marketing thought in general and S-D logic in par-
ticular. Was the introduction of this perspective to S-D logic a complete
change of direction? Had it been prefigured in previous work from the
authors and, if so, why might it have been absent from the foundational
paper? What advantages might the adoption of a systems perspective
afford S-D logic conceptually, but also rhetorically (in terms of opening
up lines of compelling argumentation)? The chapter closes with a consid-
eration of the rhetoric of transcendence in S-D logic, returning to the
identity of its core value proposition and the source of its rhetorical energy.
18 C. Miles
Finally, the sad passing of Robert Lusch in 2017 has meant that the
evolution of S-D logic continues on without his contribution, but
clearly advancing in the hands of Stephen Vargo and a range of col-
laborators. Lusch was a co-author on two pieces of writing that I have
found quite fascinating from both a rhetorical and conceptual per-
spective—Kiel et al. (1992) and Vargo and Lusch (2004). I discovered
the former piece via the latter (though it is not cited there, something
we will reflect upon in Chaps. 4 and 6). I hope that this study dem-
onstrates the reasons for my fascination. I have been writing on the
rhetorical aspects of S-D logic for a good 10 years now and I feel that
I have in many respects barely touched the surface of what sometimes
seems like a hurtling juggernaut of scholarship. My early work (a pre-
sentation at the Rhetoric and Narratives in Management Research
Conference in Barcelona in 2013 and the article, Miles, 2014b, that
came out of it) was a lot more confrontational in tone. I was con-
cerned with what I saw then as the potentially hegemonising effect of
S-D logic on marketing theory. However, over the years, I have con-
tinued to engage and reflect upon the rhetorical nature of Vargo and
Lusch’s creation and I have grown increasingly to admire its rhetorical
complexity and consistency. My discovery of Kiel et al. (1992) solidi-
fied this admiration, for here was a paper with an even greater ambi-
tion than Vargo and Lusch (2004), seeking to place a marketing
understanding of exchange somehow right at the centre of the uni-
verse. Kiel et al. (1992) changed the way I looked at Vargo and Lusch
(2004) and (2011), and that caused me to reflect further upon the
rhetorical significance of transcendence both in systems thought and
in S-D logic. My close reading of S-D logic over these years (and I
make no claim whatsoever to an ideal reading or a full reading) has
changed the way that I think about rhetoric in scholarship, systems
and cybernetic thought, and marketing theory. Thank you, Robert
Lusch. And thank you, Stephen Vargo.
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2
Rhetorical Analysis and Marketing Texts
Rhetoric: An Overview
The practice of rhetoric centres around the “detection of the persuasive
aspects of each matter” (Aristotle, 1991, p. 70). Or it is the “planned use
of symbols to achieve goals” (Herrick, 2005, p. 31). Or the “art, the fine
and useful art, of making things matter” (Farrell, 2008, p. 470). Or “the
use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings
that by nature respond to symbols” (Burke, 1966, p. 43). Or it is “a fea-
ture of the antagonistic relationship between versions: how a description
counters an alternative description, and how it is organized, in turn, to
resist being countered” (Potter, 2005, p. 108). Or, perhaps most broadly,
“any discourse, art form, performance, cultural object, or event that—by
symbolic and/or material means—has the capacity to move someone
else” (Ott & Dickinson, 2013, p. 2).
Common across these definitions is the prospect of changing an audi-
ence’s mental position—whether we characterize this as persuasion,
transport, or inducement. At the same time, all of these descriptions
come from scholars who, to one degree or another, can be said to be sym-
pathetic to the practice (or the study) of rhetoric. There are many voices
ranged across the centuries that would tend to converge on other

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46510-9_2
24 C. Miles
characterizations for the sort of mental change sought by the practice of

rhetoric. So, the charge that rhetoric is the refuge of false reasoning, lin-
guistic manipulation, and degenerate irrationality is one that has been
laid at its door since Plato (Schiappa, 1990). Kant saw rhetoric as “deceiv-
ing by means of beautiful illusions” (2000, p. 204), and Hobbes and
Rousseau, in their quite separate ways, viewed the use of rhetoric as a sign
of sickness or deficiency in public debate that brought only misunder-
standing and conflict (Martin, 2014). John Locke (1690) condemned its
capacity to “insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mis-
lead the judgement” (p. 146). The manipulative artifice of rhetoric has
often marked those who openly practice it with a lingua suspecta, as
Cicero once put it (Orator, XLII).
Since its initial formalization in the West in the heady days of Athenian
democracy, the persuasion of rhetoric has often been contrasted with
decision-making based upon evidenced, rational evaluation. As Munz
(1990) explains, “we believe we rely on rhetoric when there is no or little
evidence for a statement and when there is no or little logical argument
to support it” (p. 122)—we do not need to use rhetoric when we can
simply show that our case is true. Rhetoric is recruited when we need to
distract our audience from a lack of evidence or weaknesses in our logic.
If we have a system of discourse entirely founded upon the rational, logi-
cal demonstration of fact, then rhetoric would be redundant. Such was
the intent behind Plato’s rigorous pursuit of the Socratic method of dia-
logical exposition (Chambers, 2009) and, somewhat later, such has been
the intent behind the scientific project since its methodological concreti-
sation at the hands of the ‘plain style’ enthusiasts of the Royal Society
(Stark, 2009).
Yet, of course, nothing is ever quite so simple—the opposition of rhet-
oric and any ‘plain’, ‘rational’ or ‘scientific’ style of discourse will always
be itself a rhetorical strategy designed to privilege one context over
another, one audience over another, one set of speakers over another.
Even the most ‘pure’ forms of rational endeavour conscript linguistic
(and more broadly symbolic) strategies designed to mark in- from out-
groups, amplify authority, appeal to audience bias, and invoke emotional
response. Much scholarship from the ‘rhetorical turn’ in the study of the
human sciences has demonstrated the variegated ways in which “the
quality of speaking and writing, the interplay of media and messages, the
judgement of evidence and arguments” (Nelson et al. 1987, p. ix) in sci-
entific discourse has a rhetorical significance. Davis and Hersh (1987),
for example, have provided a detailed examination of the rhetorical
aspects of mathematical scholarship, a pursuit that one might reasonably
expect to embody the highest commitment to the eradication of emo-
tional, irrational, or biased argumentation. Yet, as they argue, the field of
mathematics is, at root, “a human interchange based on shared meanings,
not all of which are verbal or formulaic” (p. 67)—much of the authentic-
ity of its logic can rely upon the complex play of expectations and assump-
tions in the “unstated background” (p. 61) shared by the (highly
specialised) audience.
If mathematics can be seen to operate at least to some degree on a rhe-
torical level, it is no surprise that even slightly less abstract disciplines
have attracted far more attention regarding their persuasive strategies.
McCloskey’s work on the rhetorical nature of economics scholarship
(1983, 1985, 1995) has been extremely influential in the rhetorical turn
and, given the relationship between economics and the early develop-
ment of marketing theory that is alleged in Vargo & Lusch’s (2004) foun-
dational S-D logic paper, her argument that economists would be a lot
better economists if they developed a more robust reflexivity regarding
their use of metaphor, rhetorical argumentation, resonant connotations,
and linguistic gambits is one that I will be applying wholesale to the
enterprise of marketing theory. Many aspects of marketing scholarship
and practice remain trapped in the sorts of “positivistic enthusiasms of
the 1930s and 1940s” (McCloskey, 1983, p. 482) that have beset the
reflexive development of economics. Of course, for marketing, there is a
greater irony involved in its scholars being enamoured with a vision of
hyper-rational, supra-linguistic ‘scientific’ evaluation because for most
people in the world, the word ‘marketing’ is synonymous with ‘persua-
sion’ (Cluley, 2016).
26 C. Miles
The Rhetor and the Rhetorical Analyst

Before we explore further the nature of rhetorical analysis as a methodol-
ogy for the social sciences it is important to consider a central, if some-
times misleading, distinction that arises in any consideration of
rhetoric—namely, the distinction between someone using rhetoric and
someone observing and analysing it. This distinction was not overly
meaningful until the twentieth century—principally because one of the
most common ways of learning to be a good rhetor was through the close
analysis of speeches considered to be preeminent in their persuasive abil-
ity. Effective rhetors were, therefore, always practised analysts of others’
rhetoric—both for the purposes of learning how to persuade more effec-
tively but also because the facility to detect the rhetorical and argumenta-
tive strategies being used by an opponent in real-time (the realm of what
rhetoricians call kairos) were so essential to success in debate. Studying
the great oratories of Classical history provided the student with illustra-
tive models of the techniques of rhetoric so that they could attempt to use
them in their own public speaking. The Classical handbooks of rhetoric,
such as Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, Quintilian’s Institutes, Cicero’s De Oratore
and De Inventione, as well as the tremendously influential anonymous
text Rhetorica Ad Herennium, contextualised their practical discussions of
sequencing, proofs, style and delivery with illustrations drawn from cel-
ebrated political and epideictic orations (as well as famous poetic and
dramatic passages). Analysis of rhetoric was a prerequisite to its effective
practice, in other words. The motivation for pursuing the art of persua-
sion might change over time, from the formation of Quintilian’s “good
man, skilled in speaking” (quoted in Smith, 2003, p. 130) who can acquit
themselves well (and profitably) in civic life, to the Augustinian preacher
who seeks to “sway the mind so as to subdue the will” (Augustine, 2009,
p. 236) of his errant flock, from the Jesuit priest seeking to defend the
Catholic faith against the encroachment of Protestantism, to the young
university student in the Celtic fringe in the early nineteenth century
eager to secure the decorous language of social advancement in London
(Conley, 1990). Yet, this tradition of instructional analysis designed to
educate better rhetors was always at the core of rhetorical study
and continues on through the close relationship between forensics and

competitive debating that still exists in the USA and to a very small extent
in other countries. However, the balance in the modern academy has
moved strongly towards teaching rhetorical analysis as a component in
critical thinking. This orientation has meant that both students and
scholars of rhetoric are almost exclusively focused on the analysis of pub-
lic discourse in order to uncover the resources of persuasion (of inducing
cooperation, of moving an audience or group of stakeholders) that can be
seen to be woven within such discourses rather than in trying to use an
appreciation of those resources to create their own messages of induce-
ment. This has certainly lead to a vast and impressive exploration of the
rhetorical aspects of so much of contemporary cultural, political, and
social discourse, including the ‘rhetorical turn’ in the study of the sci-
ences discussed above. However, it has also meant that the production of
persuasive public discourse has somewhat slipped from the focus of those
focused on analysing the rhetoric of others. The resulting issues of ques-
tionable reflexivity and unclear persuasive intent become particularly
important when we consider the place of rhetorical analysis as a method-
ological tool in the social sciences.
hetorical Analysis as a Methodology

R
in the Social Sciences
Despite the fact that rhetorical analysis has been used with increasing
regularity in disciplines generally considered to belong to the social sci-
ences (rather than the humanities), such as organisation studies, manage-
ment studies, sociology, and even marketing, it is important to consider
the ways in which it has been utilised and to briefly explore the tensions
that might result from its adoption. Many of the objections that have
been brought against the practice of rhetoric over the centuries have
interesting corollaries when rhetorical analysis is used in the pursuit of
scholarly insight.
Social science research can be divided into confirmatory and explor-
atory modes. Reiter (2013) argues that “confirmatory social science
28 C. Miles
dominates the field” (p. 2) in the sense that the majority of scholars “use
quantitative or qualitative methods in order to prove, or corroborate,
their hypotheses” (ibid.). Exploratory social science, however, is based
upon the recognition that “what we perceive and how we perceive it has
more to do with us than with the reality we observe” (p. 5) and that the
knowledge that we are able to achieve of the world is “partial and tenta-
tive” (p. 6). Now, ‘partial and tentative’ is not exactly a persuasive selling
proposition. As Reiter (2013) points out, “one normally does not get
paid to speculate” and “confirmatory research […] is what society and
policymakers expect social scientists to achieve, as in the end, scientists
are expected to explain social reality and make predictions that help guide
actions and policymaking” (p. 3). Exploratory research, on the other
hand, “asks how much a given theory and a derived hypothesis can
explain, and how well it can explain it, or how much sense this explana-
tion makes” (p. 7). Rhetorical analysis is a form of exploratory research—
the theory that it tests for insightful or meaningful explanatory power is
that built up through the rhetorical tradition (or, indeed, traditions), a
theory of how “symbolic and/or material” means have the “capacity to
move someone else” (to return to Ott & Dickinson’s, 2013, broad defini-
tion of rhetoric). We apply the conceptual toolbox generated by the theo-
retical framework to the analysis of a text, discourse, exchange, or artefact
in order to explore the insights that it might produce related to its modes
of persuasive argumentation, its capacity to move its intended audience,
its ability to make its voice matter to those attending to it.
Here, one must note a significant lexical issue. In this book, I talk of
‘rhetorical analysis’. This is a phrase that has become common when
referring to the application of rhetorical frameworks to the examination
of business, organisational, media, and marketing discourse. So we have
Noreklitt’s (2003) paper, ‘The Balanced Scorecard: what is the score? A
rhetorical analysis of the Balanced Scorecard’, Weaver’s (2010),
‘Developing a rhetorical analysis of racist humour: Examining anti-black
jokes on the internet’, Auxtova’s (2019), ‘Behind the Rhetorical Scenes of
Offence: A Rhetorical Analysis of Complained-About Offensive
Advertising’, von Koskull and Fougère’s (2011), ‘Service development as
practice: A rhetorical analysis of customer-related arguments in a service
development project’, amongst many others. However, at the same time,

the bulk of scholars working within the field of rhetoric in the US (and
so actually teaching the application of rhetorical frameworks to the inves-
tigation of discourse at the university undergraduate level) refer to ‘rhe-
torical criticism’ rather than ‘rhetorical analysis’. So, Foss’ (2018)
much-loved textbook (currently in its fifth edition and used in “over 300
colleges and universities” according to its description on Waveland Press’
website) is titled Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration & Practice, Ott and
Dickinson’s (2013) massive edited collection of theoretical and practical
perspectives in the area is called The Routledge Reader in Rhetorical
Criticism, and Black’s (1965) groundbreaking early study is entitled
Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. In other words, work coming
from the US tradition of rhetorical scholars embedded within university
and college departments that have the specific pedagogical focus of teach-
ing students argumentation and the analysis of persuasive public dis-
course tend to speak of ‘rhetorical criticism’, while scholars who are using
rhetorical approaches in order to investigate discourses within a broader
social sciences (rather than humanities) framing tend to speak of rhetori-
cal analysis. Clearly, this lexical choice has a rhetorical aspect to it.
Scholars in the social sciences are expected to analyse data in systematic
and rigorous ways and qualitative approaches (often involved in various
forms of ‘competition’ with quantitative paradigms) therefore generally
try to talk about themselves in ways that amplify their analytical credibil-
ity (or ethos, as we would say in rhetoric). Phraseology that originates in
the humanities (such as the performance of ‘criticism’ or the ‘reading’ of
a text or artefact) will inevitably be downplayed in favour of descriptions
that help to strengthen the impression that the research that is being done
conforms as closely to the expectations of the sort of confirmatory inves-
tigations that Reiter (2013) describes above. We can point to this termi-
nological difference as a manifestation of the continuing tension between
humanities and social science approaches to scholarship (and pedagogy).
However, the modern academy is certainly not divided clearly and cleanly
into such silos and there are significant areas of hybridity, fusion, and co-
creation across approaches. A perfect example of this is Foss’ (2004, p. 6)
own definition of rhetorical criticism as:
30 C. Miles
a qualitative research method that is designed for the systematic investiga-

tion and explanation of symbolic acts and artifacts for the purpose of
understanding rhetorical processes. this definition includes three primary
dimensions: (1) systematic analysis as the act of criticism; (2) acts and arti-
facts as the objects of analysis in criticism; and (3) understanding rhetorical
processes as the purpose of criticism
There is an attempt here to both position rhetorical criticism within a

larger umbrella of ‘qualitative research methods’ (and so provide it with a
familiar social sciences grounding for students who might be studying
research methods on other courses) and to interpret criticism as analysis.
Despite the strategic inclusion of ‘analysis’ in her definition, though, the
method is still identified as rhetorical criticism. The historical legacy of
Hubert Wicheln’s (1925) essay ‘The Literary Criticism of Oratory’ is per-
haps important here. It established the “basic outlines” of the “traditional
perspective for rhetorical criticism” that was exercised in the burgeoning
speech departments of US higher education of the mid-twentieth cen-
tury (Scott and Brock, 1972, p. 19) and clearly, it took its initial frame of
methodological reference from literary criticism. Despite Wicheln’s strict
neo-Aristotelian approach to the analysis of persuasive address giving way
to a much more pluralistic, even syncretic, spirit in the rhetorical scholar-
ship of the last sixty years, its roots in the literary and humanities tradi-
tions of criticism are hard to entirely break free from (even if there was an
entirely convincing reason to do so). Yet, to return more broadly to
Reiter’s (2013) earlier point regarding the ascendancy of the confirma-
tory social sciences, the expectations around funded research (and there-
fore around ‘productive’ research faculty) have become deeply entwined
with assumptions concerning objectivity, empirical methods for the
uncovering of truth, and the ability to make predictions that can have
relevance in the creation of social policy. It is therefore important to be
able to identify rhetorical criticism as a “qualitative research method”
utilising “systematic analysis”, as Foss (2004) does, so that it can stand
safely alongside all the other qualitative research methods.
There are some good reasons that scholars (and administrators, and
journal editors, and funders) embedded within the social sciences might
be uncomfortable with the interpretive traditions connoted by the
lexicon of ‘criticism’ and ‘close reading’. As Middleton has pointed out,

the close reading method that has largely dominated literary scholarship
is “a heterogeneous and largely unorganized set of practices and assump-
tions” (2005, p. 5). It is also a method that is notoriously resistant to
explicit codification. As Culler (2010) admits, “as soon as we come up
with accounts of particular operations students should carry out or steps
they should follow, we fear that we are producing something like doctrine
about the functioning of literary works and steps of a critical method”,
and close reading, its proponents and practitioners believe, should be
“something more basic, more fundamental, than theories of literature or
critical methodologies” (p. 22). Accordingly, close reading is taught via
students being exposed to its practice, rather than by careful explication
of its methodological frameworks and sequences. The close relationship
between the traditions of close reading, literary scholarship, and rhetori-
cal criticism can be seen in Culler’s own definition of close reading as
“attention to how meaning is produced or conveyed, to what sorts of
literary and rhetorical strategies and techniques are deployed to achieve
what the reader takes to be the effects of the work or passage” (ibid.). This
is echoed in Smith’s (2016) description of the “not quite a methodology”
as “reading individual texts with attention to their linguistic features and
rhetorical operations” (p. 57). Indeed, she identifies “classical rhetorical
analysis” as one of the “multiple ancestors” of the practice of close read-
ing, alongside “biblical exegesis, and legal interpretation” (p. 58), draw-
ing attention to the circularity of influence that therefore characterises
the twentieth-century establishment of rhetorical criticism through the
decidedly literary backgrounds of such key figures as Wicheln, Kenneth
Burke, and Edwin Black.
The fundamental assumption of close reading and all those traditions
that it has been influenced by and in turn that it has influenced, is that
there is more to the artefacts of human communication than meet the eye
on what we might call a ‘superficial reading’. It realises that most of the
time we do not pay close attention to what we are reading, watching, or
listening to—or indeed, even what we are ourselves are writing and say-
ing (or singing, or painting, etc.). There are insights, therefore, that can
be uncovered through close apprehension of a verbal or visual text—
insights that would not occur to us during our usual, superficial,
32 C. Miles
relationship with that text. One might live with a text for many years, for
a lifetime, even, and still never pay it the sort of close attention that
uncovers new meanings and consequences precisely because one
might have never taken the time to read it closely, to look carefully at
each word, each phrase and the syntagmatic relationships between such
components. And this applies not just to things we might consider to be
ephemeral or inconsequential, of course. How many marketers, I won-
der, have closely read Levitt’s (1983) HBR paper, ‘The globalisation of
markets’? A tremendously influential, highly cited, article, yet one that
quickly begins to reveal some quite hair-raising aspects to its persuasive
gambits on more attentive inspection. The various traditions of close
reading highlight the inattentiveness with which we go about so much of
our communicative life.
Yet, as noted above, close reading is a practice that has often resisted
formalisation. Perhaps, indeed, this has been because formalisation inevi-
tably leads to a degree of inattention—in following a series of formalised
methodological steps one risks disengaging one’s critical faculties, switch-
ing over to automatic pilot. Nevertheless, the motivations for settling
upon codifications and formalisations of a method are many and strong
in the modern academy and rhetorical criticism (and analysis) have ben-
efited from considerable efforts to make the teaching of the method in
the college and university classroom a systematic and somewhat uniform
practice. Foss’ (2004) textbook is perhaps the most obvious example here,
being broken down in to a series of chapters that explicate a variety of
rhetorical approaches (neo-Aristotelian, metaphor criticism, cluster criti-
cism, Burkeian pentadic criticism, etc.), each provided with a step-by-
step methodology that walks the reader through selecting an artefact,
formulating a research question, performing the analysis and then writ-
ing the results up. Each chapter is then finished with at least two example
analyses performed by rhetorical scholars on a wide variety of artefacts. A
slightly different approach is used by Longaker and Walker (2011) in
their textbook, one more heavily grounded in a classical, or neo-
Aristotelian framing, though they introduce more recent rhetorical
approaches such as cluster criticism in later chapters. Again, the authors
provide many examples of sample analyses of a wide variety of texts
(political speeches, adverts, PSAs, etc.) using the different rhetorical
concepts they cover. Despite the fact that Foss’ (2004) book provides an
exegesis of rhetorical criticism while Longaker and Walker’s (2011) does
so for rhetorical analysis, both seek to build the reader’s confidence in the
method through careful discussion of systematic sequences of analysis
and the theories informing those systematic sequences, and then the pro-
vision of ample illustrative analysis. To make of them, in other words,
investigative approaches that can be used within the qualitative research
methods paradigm of the social sciences, despite their origins in the
humanities.
Of course, there is a tradition of researchers importing humanities
approaches directly into the social sciences-dominated discipline of mar-
keting scholarship. Barbara Stern, in particular, championed the adop-
tion of literary theory and literary criticism for the exploration and
analysis of advertising (Stern 1991, 1993a, 1993b, 1994, 1996; Stern &
Schroeder, 1994; ) and occasionally touched on areas, such as allegory,
that cross over into the territory of classical rhetoric (Stern 1988, 1990).
Linda Scott, too, was an early and persuasive voice in the application of
rhetorical and broader humanities-inspired approaches to advertising
scholarship (Scott, 1990, 1994a, 1994b). Hirschman (1986) also has
argued cogently for the adoption of humanistic, interpretative research
methods into marketing scholarship, arguing that as “the conception of
what marketing is has evolved, so must the methods of inquiry also
evolve” and as marketing “now is viewed as a socially constructed enter-
prise”, so it should look to “inputs from the humanistic modes of inquiry
developed specifically to address socially constructed phenomena”
(p. 238). Similarly, Stephen Brown has consistently applied the methods
of literary criticism to his investigation of the process and practice of
marketing writing as well as the stylistic strategies of some of its most
influential voices (Brown 1995, 1999, 2002, 2004; Brown et al. 1999;
Brown & Wijland, 2018) and this work has gone hand-in-hand with his
promotion of marketing as a creative art rather than a social or soft sci-
ence (Brown, 1996, 2009). Yet, despite the work of Brown, Stern, Scott,
and a small committed cadre of researchers inspired by the literary or
historical traditions of the humanities, most marketing scholarship con-
tinues to be characterised by scholarly habits and practices that seek to
embody the ‘scientific’ rather than the ‘humanistic’ approach. Tadajewski
34 C. Miles
(2006) has rigorously explored the political and institutional pressures

that have lead marketing thought to be particularly spellbound by the
prospect that “one day it will establish itself as a ‘science’” (p. 183). This
means that even when marketing researchers use concepts and approaches
that originate in literary or humanistic interpretive traditions, they tend
to ‘operationalise’ them in manners that lend them the patina of scientific
respectability. So, for example, the great work done by McQuarrie and
Mick (1999, 1996, 2003) and Phillips and McQuarrie (2002) on visual
and verbal rhetoric in advertising executions is generally framed in terms
and methodological practices that will be comfortable and credible to
social scientists familiar with the processes of content analysis, thematic
analysis, and other systematised, sequential codifications of investigation
that bring the patina of scientism to the humanities traditions of reading
texts. So, McQuarrie and Mick’s (1996) article investigating rhetorical
figures in advertising speaks of “preliminary validation data” for their tax-
onomy that is collected from “67 undergraduates from a psychology
course” who rated advertising headlines on a “10-point rating scale” and
that was then subjected to a “paired sample t-test” and “repeated-measures
MANOVA” to compare “schematic with tropic and simple with com-
plex” (p. 434) rhetorical figures. Phillips and McQuarrie’s (2002) paper
investigating “the transformation of rhetorical style in magazine adver-
tisements 1954-1999” does use a “content assessment” as the first stage in
its bipartite method, and they describe this as a method used by “histori-
cal researchers in journalism studies” that involves “extensive reading,
sifting, weighing, comparing, and analyzing” of material “in order to tell
the story” (p. 3, quoting Marzolf, 1978). So, the initial analysis of their
advertising texts is presented as a form of historical (i.e. humanities) and
social sciences (i.e. media/journalism studies) hybrid close reading.
However, they then note that “what content assessment cannot do, of
course, is provide quantified data suitable for statistical analysis” and “for
this reason, a content analysis was undertaken following the content
assessment” (ibid.)—yet, the need for “statistical analysis” is never
explained, it is just taken for granted that the audience would expect
statistical analysis in a study of historical changes in rhetorical style of
magazine advertisements. Close reading is able to provide an “integrative
perspective, based on all the elements of an ad” and also serves “as a
discovery procedure” (ibid.)—but such valuable work is lacking if it is

not then proven with statistical analysis. Of course, McQuarrie, Mick,
and Philips are consciously committed to the linking of “the text-
interpretive and experimental traditions” (McQuarrie and Mick, 1999,
p. 38) and this is an admirable project that has produced some beautiful
and insightful work. And the integration of close/critical reading tradi-
tions with those of psychological experimentation and statistical analysis
has allowed the former some regular access into those journals of the
discipline that act as gatekeepers of the ‘marketing as science’ perspective.
Yet, the fact remains that the what is of value in the close/critical reading
traditions of the humanities, namely the careful, unhurried, attention to
uncovering and considering the many meanings and meaning-networks
that might be enfolded into a text, gets short shrift.
It is, to reiterate, attention that is at the root of the close reading/critical
reading/rhetorical analysis method, that gives all these variations on the
same theme their peculiar power, their unique contribution to explor-
atory scholarship. The non-stop growth of media networks and the com-
mercial (and political) interests that use them to communicate with us
every waking moment is said to have created a global “attention econ-
omy” (Goldhaber, 1997, p. 1). As Wu (2017) notes, “over the last century
[…] we have come to accept a very different way of being, whereby nearly
every bit of our lives is commercially exploited to the extent that it can
be”, with the consequence that “we are hardly ever unreachable; seldom
away from as screen of some kind; rarely not being solicited or sold to”
(p. 5). In tandem with the ever-encroaching forces of commercial exploi-
tation of our attention is the seemingly infinite amount of information
that is now but a click, a swipe, or a glance away. In the words of Simon’s
(1971) original formulation of ‘information overload’, “a wealth of infor-
mation creates a poverty of attention” (p. 40). Having so much to read
(content to consume) means that we attend less and less to the things that
we do read—our focus fractured and febrile as we flit from one text to
another, one image to the next, across multiple accounts and identities in
a spiralling chaos of voices, opinions, and demands. Reading carefully (or
consuming with full attention) is something that is increasingly challeng-
ing to achieve. It is no wonder, indeed, that we might look to shortcuts,
automations, methods of summarising and aggregation that ‘save us time’
36 C. Miles
by becoming surrogates for our own attention. We are outsourcing our

attention tasks. But, more importantly, as Simon’s dictum implies, and as
cybernetics has long maintained (Ashby, 1957; Beer, 1995), if the variety
of input into your system increases you have two options—variety atten-
uation (filtering the input so that only a manageable level of variety is
processed) or variety amplification (increasing the internal variety of your
system to match the increase in input variety). The latter option is prob-
lematic; the conceptual grounds for the attention economy, after all, rest
upon the fact that attention is a fixed (scarce) resource. Arbitrarily increas-
ing the attention that our system is capable of generating is not an option
(though as a veteran of the late 1980s transhumanist interest in smart
drugs, I can attest to the human willingness to try). The normal solution
is to try to deal with the increase in external variety by allocating smaller
amounts of attention to each thing. But this, naturally, has a limit—we
can only apportion out our attention so far before we reach the end of
our store, scraping the bottom of the barrel. At that point, we can only
attenuate variety—choosing to ignore whole areas of discourse, switch off
from inputs that we judge unprofitable or unrewarding, but also funda-
mentally changing our attention modes. So, we move from a focus on
“deep attention” to a more general strategy of “hyper attention”. As
Hayles (2007) explains, deep attention is “the cognitive style traditionally
associated with the humanities, […] characterized by concentrating on a
single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside
stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and
having a high tolerance for long focus times”. Hyper attention, on the
other hand, involves “switching focus rapidly among different tasks, pre-
ferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation,
and having a low tolerance for boredom” (p. 187). Importantly, it is deep
attention that Hayles identifies as the more recent evolutionary adapta-
tion, describing it as a “relative luxury, requiring group cooperation to
create a secure environment in which one does not have to be constantly
alert to danger” (p. 188). Hyper attention is admirably suited to environ-
ments of constant threat and opportunity where it allows us to continu-
ally scan our changing surroundings and successfully negotiate the
challenges of foraging and hunting—or, indeed, the hyper-connected,
always-on, dopamine-driven skimming of the modern attention
economy. As Hayles argues, deep attention has been the engine behind
the humanities traditions of close reading and analysis. However, it is
becoming a cognitive mode increasingly side-lined as the variety and
velocity of information that demands our attention increases.
So, this is where we return to the value of rhetorical criticism—it
encourages us to apply deep attention to the consideration of the persua-
sive aspects of discourse artefacts that we are increasingly not thinking
deeply about (because we are becoming entrained to apply hyper atten-
tion in all areas of our lives, including our professional and disciplinary
practices). Ironically, if we follow Lanham (2007), rhetoric itself is the
best candidate that we have for an “economics of attention” (p. 21), as it
has concerned itself with the study of the most efficient and effective
“attention structures” (ibid.) for a good two and a half thousands years.
The deployment of style (or what Lanham calls ‘fluff’ in distinction to
‘stuff’ or substance) in our communication is the rhetorical means
through which we catch attention and marshal it to the point we strategi-
cally desire it to focus. Rhetorical criticism (or analysis), allows us to care-
fully explore the constructions of these ‘attention structures’ by bringing
our deep attention to bear upon them.
The social sciences have increasingly deemphasised humanities-derived
deep attention methods of analysis. The reasons for this might have just
as much to do with increasing tendencies towards hyper attention modal-
ities in higher education as they do with Reiter’s (2013) argument regard-
ing the bias towards confirmatory research. In addition, inevitably, as a
part of their identity construction work, the social sciences have defined
themselves in opposition to an Other. That Other, particularly in the
‘disciplining’ of marketing scholarship since the 1950s (see, again,
Tadajewski, 2006), has been largely borrowed from the early identity
construction of the physical sciences. As Stark (2009) has shown, the
early institutionalisation and codification of the scientific approach as
embodied in the work of the Royal Society in the seventeenth-century,
manifested itself as a rejection of the traditions of natural philosophy (the
home of Neo-Platonists, Hermeticists, magicians, and astrologers) that
saw the world as a text whose occult secrets might be unlocked through
close attendance to the relationships between language and reality. For
the natural philosopher “language is by its very nature simultaneous with
38 C. Miles
and indicative of reality”, whereas for the new experimentalists of the

Royal Society “language becomes a mechanism used to discuss reality, a
neutral, functional, plain object, not an occult device capable of trans-
mogrifying reality” (Stark, 2009, p. 114). These pioneers of the Royal
Society, along with those following the lead of Descartes, Pascale, and the
Port-Royal logicians, set the course of the scientific method as we know
it today, and their aim was to rid philosophy of its Hermetic hermeneu-
tics, its reliance on eloquence, rhetorical flourish, and occult fixations on
the power of language to cause effects in the world. Language thus
becomes something that should be as plain as possible, shorn of ‘poetry’
and emotionally distracting (and manipulating) figurations. Yet, natu-
rally, all that has really meant is that new metaphors are substituted for
the old ones, new tropes and schemes have substituted for the tried and
true, and so language has continued to be a tool for persuasive gambits in
modern science (and social science). The ‘plain style’ of the Royal Society
became its own rhetorical strategy, used to police boundaries, confer
credibility, and impose hieratic obeisance. In one of the most comical
instances of just how difficult it has been for science to rid itself of the
legacy of rhetoric and its strategic approach to persuasive (manipulative,
tomayto, tomahto) communication, Horton (1995), writing in the British
Medical Journal, points out that the “format of research papers published
in this and other journals conforms to classical ideas of rhetorical presen-
tation”—Aristotle’s “four elements that make up successful oratory:
introduction, narration, proof, and epilogue” are “self-evident[ly]” the
basis for the “familiar ‘IMRAD’ format of a scientific paper—introduc-
tion, methods, results, and discussion” (p. 986). Horton goes on to
explain how “each part of a published paper is open to rhetorical manipu-
lation by the author”, from an “unstructured abstract” giving “authors
more freedom to include or exclude information of their own choosing”,
to the use of figures and tables to “enhance the persuasive power of one
result over that of another”, and the discussion section’s obvious use to
“to cajole and convince” (p. 987). In other words, while the practice of
science has evolved by defining itself against the Other of occult textual
hermeneutics and the obscuring manipulations of persuasive language, it
nevertheless cannot escape the power of language and rhetorical argu-
mentation. A scientific paper, by necessity, “describes a specific path,
carefully carved by the authors, through a complex undergrowth of com-

peting arguments” (ibid.). And this goes just as much for a piece of mar-
keting scholarship.
Applying the humanities traditions of deep attention to a text via the
process of rhetorical analysis allows us to carefully consider how a piece
of marketing scholarship advances its arguments, how it seeks to per-
suade us of its credibility and insight, and how it functions as an attempt
to move an audience towards a particular way of thinking. We are, effec-
tively, using the same approach that we might for looking at how an
advertisement seeks to persuade in order to investigate how a piece of
marketing scholarship might do so. The results of any such exploration
are, to remind ourselves of Reiter’s (2013) phrase “partial and tentative”.
It is impossible to claim that one has fully mined the persuasive resources
of any sort of text—there might always be something that a researcher
can miss, particularly in large bodies of work across many years but even
with brief ephemeral artefacts, there is the risk that something might be
going on that the researcher remains unaware of. Rhetorical analysis is
always tentative—and this is where the humanities tradition of the ‘read-
ing’ once more becomes useful. Any rhetorical analysis takes the form of
a particular reading, performed by a particular person at a particular time,
with a particular intent (or focus). Others might come to the text with
different particularities (different sensibilities to aspects of rhetorical tra-
ditions, different experience with similar texts, different intentions, etc.).
While this might make those social scientists operating within a confir-
matory perspective uneasy, I hope that the analysis provided in the cur-
rent work will demonstrate that the risks of this approach are balanced by
the deep attention and consideration that can be brought to bear upon
the material.
It is my strong belief that the work of marketing scholars does deserve
to be closely read—important scholarly work that provides the founda-
tions for the discipline, or that pushes the discipline forward, should be
read with deep attention and should be explored for the argumentation
and persuasive strategies that are recruited in support of its conclu-
sions. Significantly, this is not in order to criticise such work, to expose
the attention structures underpinning it so as to, in some sense, devalue
it or argue for its censure. Given that (in Horton’s words) all scholarship
40 C. Miles
(scientific or otherwise) seeks to “cajole and convince”, it is vital for our

understanding of our own discipline and the principles upon which it is
built that we pay close attention to how its foundations and evolutions
are argued for. We need to be aware (as far as possible) of how we have
been persuaded that a particular perspective is ‘true’ (or ‘self-evident’, or
‘proven’, or ‘dominant’). Rhetorical analysis of marketing scholarship
therefore fosters a reflexive approach to our discipline—an approach that
can only lead to a deeper understanding of its legacy and its future, and
an approach that makes us better scholars.
We might think, given the greater and greater demands on our atten-
tion made by modern higher education and research environments, that
while an investigation of the rhetorical argumentation deployed in mar-
keting scholarship’s seminal works is a worthwhile thing, we should per-
haps, for efficiency’s sake, abdicate this responsibility to the peer reviewers,
journal editors, and associated gatekeepers that the modern scholarly
publishing complex has put in place to ‘check’ the logic, and root out the
manipulations of submitting authors. If something passes peer review,
then surely we can be confident that at least two or three people have
given their ‘deep attention’ to the text? However, as we will see in the next
chapter, peer review is itself an intense site of rhetorical struggle (akin to
the virtue-amplifying agon of Olympic competition) and cannot seri-
ously be considered to be a process that ‘corrects’ argumentation, weeds
out stylistic rhetorical strategies and outputs a pure, objective, persuasion-
free text at the end. Instead, it is a negotiation between a number of
persuasive voices each with their own motivations, expectations, and rhe-
torical styles. So, while we might reasonably expect a certain standard of
explication and methodological soundness from the papers we read in
published journals (with those expectations increasing as we scan up the
ladder of impact factors), we should not pretend that this means each
paper has been ‘disinfected’ of rhetoric (as if such a thing were even desir-
able, let alone possible). Indeed, what we most readily can infer is that
each paper has been processed into a hybrid rhetorical form that is accept-
able to the particular reviewers and editors who have handled it
(Berkenkotter 1995; Sullivan, 2000). Consequently, at the very least, rhe-
torical analysis of marketing scholarship allows us to study what strategies
of argumentation and persuasive style are acceptable for different journals
and different topic areas. To be sure, we all do this when submitting to

journals and acting upon peer review, but in an informal, semi-aware
manner. A more formal, and informed, approach would be of benefit to
all scholars navigating this essential aspect of academic communication.
Non-Western Rhetorical Analysis

Before moving on to a review of the rhetorical analysis tool box, there is
one final point that needs to be addressed. In every instance of my use of
the word ‘rhetoric’ above I have implicitly been referring to the tradition
of Greco-Roman rhetoric, which is the tradition that has largely influ-
enced Western European cultural understandings of persuasive commu-
nication until the advent of psychological approaches to persuasion in the
early twentieth century (which, much of the time has simply experimen-
tally corroborated the principles of that rhetorical tradition). However,
over the last thirty years there have been increasing moves to look beyond
the Greco-Roman tradition and to study the practices and theories of
public address, and their associated modes of consensus creation, that
have existed (and might continue to exist) in non-Western cultures. This
study is often referred to as “comparative rhetoric” (Kennedy, 1997) or
“non-western rhetorical theory” (Donawerth et al., 1994), or “global
rhetoric” (Melfi et al., 2021). The motivations for this burgeoning study
are eminently sensible; as Lloyd (2021) notes, “peoples of the world not
only speak different languages, but also employ different rhetorics [and]
we ignore this at our peril” (p. 3). The Western and patriarchal biases in
the educational and cultural traditions of Europe and North America, as
well as the legacies of colonial rule across the world mean that while we
might assume that the Greco-Roman tradition of rhetoric is the only one
in existence, this is most decidedly not the case. Traditions of Islamic
rhetoric (Chowdhury, 2015), Chinese Classical rhetoric (Wu, 2021),
Turkish rhetoric (Guler, 2021), and Vedic rhetoric (Melfi, 2021) amongst
many others have been brought into the consideration of the compara-
tive rhetoric project. While much of this research concerns itself with the
‘recovery’ of traditions of rhetoric that have for various reasons been
obscured or suppressed in Western versions of global communication
42 C. Miles
history, there is also much that is immediately relevant to consideration

of public, political, and commercial communication across and within
cultures in the modern world. As Donawerth et al. (1994) succinctly
enquire, “if we define rhetoric only by what elite Western men wrote to
train elite Western boys for public responsibilities, what are we leaving
out that may be useful for today’s more diverse audience?” (p. 167).
Marketing communication that seeks to engage and move target audi-
ences across cultures should naturally take heed of the lessons of com-
parative rhetoric, demonstrating as it often does the idea that persuasion
as we have defined and practised it in the Greco-Roman/Western tradi-
tion is not necessarily a given—there are other ways to reach consensus,
entirely different paths that make of our persuasive strategies something
quite Other.
Yet, as of right now, the international scholarly publishing complex
that we inhabit as marketing academics is very much an institution suf-
fused with the legacy of the Greco-Roman understanding of public argu-
mentation and the power of rhetorical style. In the rhetorical analysis that
I shall be conducting in the next chapters there will only very rarely be
cause to consider the strategic use of symbolic meanings outside of that
legacy. The discourse that constitutes the Service-Dominant logic has
been produced by and for those working within the discipline (rather
than the practice or profession) of marketing, a discipline that has been,
up until now, dominated by Western cultural and intellectual assump-
tions. While there are, perhaps, some signs that this might be changing
(venues such as Marketing Theory, the Journal of Macromarketing, the
Journal of Islamic Marketing, and the Asia-Pacific Journal of Marketing and
Logistics, amongst others, have all published papers that have offered
alternatives to traditional Western marketing paradigms) so much schol-
arly work focused on non-Western markets or consumers still adopts the
lens of Western marketing thought (and its assumptions regarding per-
suasion and motivation). ‘Marketing’ is, after all, a tremendously popular
Western export.
Certainly, any rhetorical analysis of marketing scholarship can only
help to make more evident those Greco-Roman assumptions regarding
powerful argumentation and affective style that underlie so much of its
public discourse. It should also be noted that even within the Western
tradition of rhetoric there are competing and alternative voices. For

example, the tradition of Sophistic rhetoric, which often seems to revel in
both relativism and word magic (de Romilly, 1975) has been argued by
Cassin (2014) to be entirely ‘Othered’ in Aristotle’s work and therefore
largely suppressed in the Western tradition. As a result, rhetorical
approaches that descend from the rediscovery of Sophistic writers can
appear quite different in emphasis from those drawn from the Aristotelean
legacy (for marketing-related examples of this, see Marsh, 2013, for a
fascinating Isocratean approach to public relations as rhetoric, as well as
Miles, 2018, for my own Sophistic reading of marketing as rhetoric). In
other words, the history of Western rhetoric is a complex and nuanced
one even though it is has been dominated by the legacy of Aristotle and
those Roman authors who followed in his footsteps such as Cicero and
Quintilian.
Key Rhetorical Concepts

It would not be possible for me here to provide a comprehensive overview
of the key rhetorical concepts as they have been formulated in modern
rhetorical criticism/analysis. I would direct the reader interested in a
wide-ranging introduction to the Western rhetorical tradition to
Kennedy’s (1994) A New History of Classical Rhetoric, Conley’s (1990)
Rhetoric in the European Tradition, Fahnestock’s (2011) Rhetorical Style:
The Uses of Language in Persuasion, Lanham’s (1991) A Handlist of
Rhetorical Terms, McCroskey’s (2016) An Introduction to Rhetorical
Communication, Foss et al.’s (2002) Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric,
and, of course, Foss’ (2018) Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration & Practice.
There are many other great introductions and guides readily available.
What I am going to endeavour to set out below are the contents of the
rhetorical analysis tool box that I tend to use when approaching a piece
of marketing writing (whether it be a marcoms execution, professional
marketing discourse in an agency report, a piece of trade press journal-
ism, or marketing scholarship). Consequently, the definitions and illus-
trations will tend to be contextualised within the general area of marketing
44 C. Miles
discourse and they are chosen for their relevance to the analysis performed
in the bulk of this study.
The Genres of Rhetoric
Aristotle (1991) divided rhetoric into three main genres or species: foren-
sic/judicial oratory (for prosecution and defence in the law courts), delib-
erative oratory (for exhortation and dehortation/deterrence in political
assemblies), and finally demonstrative or ceremonial oratory (often
referred to by its Greek name, epideictic, and referring to speeches made
in order to praise or blame a particular figure or quality). As McCroskey
(2016) points out, “given the nature of the culture of Greece during his
time, these were seen as the only kinds of speaking that were of impor-
tance to study” (p. 7), nevertheless, they “remained fundamental through-
out the history of classical rhetoric and are still useful in categorizing
forms of discourse today” (Kennedy, 1994, p. 4). While the sites and
concerns of political and legal persuasion are largely easy to recognise,
those of epideictic might initially appear somewhat mysterious. Kennedy
(1994) notes that, “the concept of epideictic rhetoric […] needs to be
broadened beyond Aristotle’s definition” and is perhaps “best regarded as
any discourse that does not aim at a specific action but is intended to
influence the values and beliefs of the audience” (p. 4). When understood
in this light, epideictic suddenly becomes a lot more clear and its central-
ity to modern life a lot more important. So much modern professional
(corporate, brand, institutional, etc.) communication is focused on influ-
encing the perceptions and understandings of value held by stakeholders
(and, of course, this is a core concern of S-D logic). Closer to home,
marketing scholarship generally takes the form of authors seeking to per-
suade an audience of the value of their work, their approach and their
conclusions, and so influencing their beliefs about the models, theories,
or frameworks that they are investigating. Marketing communications
executions (advertising, public relations, promotional copy on websites)
are obviously also very much in the business of epideictic rhetoric. At the
same time, it is also true that many communication contexts are complex
and it might well be the case that, for example, deliberative/political
motivations can mix with epideictic ones (so, political campaign advertis-
ing seeks to influence audience values and beliefs in a candidate or party
but are concomitantly directed at exhortation to vote for that candidate).
Hybrid forms, then, of the three rhetorical genres are inevitable. A piece
of scholarship might establish a part of its case by attempting to persuade
the audience of a particular vision of what happened in the discipline’s
past (the past being generally the realm of forensic rhetoric) and then use
that as a stepping stone to arguing for what we should all be doing in
order to take the discipline in to the future (the realm of deliberative
rhetoric), or how we should think about, or value, a new way of conceiv-
ing the discipline that arises out of that initial historical case (the realm of
epideictic rhetoric). Thinking about how one genre transforms into
another within a piece of writing allows us to track the larger argumenta-
tive strategies at play.
Persuasive Proof
Probably one of the most foundational rhetorical categorisations that

Aristotle provided us with is the distinction between the three different
types of proof that can be provided in persuasive discourse. These are
sometimes referred to as the ‘artistic’ (or technical) proofs, to distinguish
them from the ‘inartistic’ (non-technical) proofs of things such as “wit-
nesses, tortures, depositions and such like” (Aristotle, 1991, p. 74). The
three artistic proofs, then, are ethos (proofs that “reside in the character of
the speaker”, ibid.), pathos (those that reside in a certain emotional “dis-
position of the audience”, ibid.), and logos (that reside in the demonstra-
tive techniques of the speech itself ).
How do these three forms of persuasive proof operate within the con-
text of marketing scholarship? Well, the role of ethos in scholarship is
vital. When we talk about the character of the speaker, we mean, essen-
tially, ‘source credibility’; the impression that the speaker or author gives
us regarding whether they can be trusted or not. This can be influenced
by a wide variety of elements—existing reputation, title or professional
affiliation, lexical choices, perceived facility with language, accent or use
of idiom, dress, posture, etc. In an academic context, the ethos of a
46 C. Miles
journal article is often generated through the venue in it which it appears

(i.e. appearance in the Journal of Marketing affords more ethos to a paper
than its appearance in a non-AMA, smaller journal of lower impact rank-
ing), whether the authors are familiar to the reader (i.e. they have an
established publication record in the field), what the institutional affilia-
tions of the author are (famous research universities versus smaller,
regional teaching-focused colleges), and then how far the paper fulfils the
expectations of substance, form, language and style that the reader brings
to it. The double-blind peer review process is designed to erase (as far as
possible) the reputational influence of authors and their institutions.
However, this only works pre-publication—once the paper is published,
these elements inevitably assert themselves in the matrix of ethos genera-
tion. As we will see in the following chapters, there are many stylistic and
formal aspects of academic work that can help contribute to the amplifi-
cation of ethos, increasing the credibility of a paper’s argument and
positioning.
One might expect the part played by pathos in marketing scholarship
to be slight. Pathos involves the manipulation of the audience into an
emotional state that is conducive for the acceptance of the position that
the speaker is attempting to advance. So, if you are trying to convince a
parliament to approve of a declaration of war, you need to arouse the
emotions of outrage and anger. Rhetoric recognises that emotions influ-
ence decision-making—we are not always (or even usually) entirely ratio-
nal, even when we might be making judgements on serious matters (in
places like law courts, political assemblies, and scholarly publications). In
marketing scholarship, the sorts of emotions that might be productive to
instil in our audience will rarely be of the extreme variety that we might
encounter in political debate or even legal presentations to juries. Instead,
depending on the particular context and argument we might wish to
make, it might suit us to foster a sense of hope, or relief, or confidence,
or excitement (for an idea that we might be promoting as new), or unease
and discomfort with the ideas of those whom we are placing our argu-
ment in opposition to. Such emotions can help tip the balance of the
reader’s judgement. But how might an author create them? Pathos is
often generated through the use of stylistic devices such as metaphor and
metonymy that allow the creation of powerful comparisons that have
little to do with objective logic but a lot to do with poetic enchantment.

Additionally, the use of parallel constructions and rhythmic effects can
also serve to generate emotional responses in an audience. We will be
dealing with these stylistic elements in more detail below, but for now it
is enough to note that pathos is by no means a small factor in academic
writing.
Logos in rhetoric refers to the types of logical argument that we might
make in persuasive communication. Aristotle identified two forms of
rhetorical argumentation—inductive (typified by a speaker’s use of exam-
ples, where a general rule is drawn from the presentation of a specific
instance) and deductive (typified by what rhetoric terms the enthymeme,
whereby a general truth accepted by the audience is used to argue for its
application in a particular case). this is informal argumentation, not the
sort of formal patterns of inference that we concern ourselves with in
logic or dialectic. Importantly, rhetorical argumentation is based not on
certainties but on probabilities—what we can convince an audience is
most probably the case. Enthymemes are the informal version of syllo-
gisms, the sort of deductive patternings that we tend to use in everyday
argument. So, while the classical syllogism has two premises (the major
and the minor) that lead to a conclusion, the enthymeme leaves one
premise out because it “can often be assumed to be known to the audi-
ence”, as Kennedy (1994, p. 58) notes, and so “in its common form is an
assertion supported by a reason” (ibid.). This makes the enthymeme-
based argument a lot easier to construct and also has the benefit that “the
audience believes they have arrived at the conclusion on their own, rather
than because of an argument supplied by the orator” (Charteris-Black,
2018, p. 13). Much of the details in enthymematic argument therefore
“remain tacit or unexpressed” (Blair, 2004, p. 52) and this also makes
such argument highly conducive to visual, rather than just verbal, fram-
ing. We shall see in later chapters the way that enthymemes can be used
in academic writing—basing part of your reasoning on unvoiced assump-
tions held to be true or self-evident by your audience is a powerful and
efficient way to proceed in the manufacturing of consent. Similarly,
although we might baulk at the ‘n=1’ nature of inductive logic’s drawing
of general rules from single examples, they are nevertheless tremendously
effective forms of proof. Examples, after all, are a form of story, and the
48 C. Miles
human attraction to narrative, the hold it can have on our attention and
engagement, makes stories compelling vehicles of reasoning about all
sorts of things. Marketing scholars should be familiar enough with the
case study method of teaching to recognise just how fundamentally we
rely on the inductive logic of the example in our own discipline.
The three proofs of ethos, logos, and pathos will be important touch-
stones in my rhetorical analysis of Service-Dominant logic. There is a
further aspect of rhetorical argumentation that it is worth taking note of
and that is the logical fallacy. For many people who have passed through
higher education in the USA, logical fallacies will be familiar as compo-
nents of the ubiquitous COMP101 or ‘Freshman Composition’ class.
Collections of them have featured in rhetorical handbooks for hundreds
of years and they are usually taught as patterns of mistaken reasoning that
betray a weak argument and that should be avoided in one’s own dis-
course while being attacked in one’s opponent’s. Of course, this is a rather
simplistic take—many common fallacies also furnish popular means of
amplifying ethos and generating pathos. The argumentum ad antiquita-
tem (or argument from age or tradition) is logically incorrect because it
does not make sense that just because something is old, or has always been
done a particular way, it should be valued—we can all think of old things
that are quite worthless, after all. Yet, it is a familiar line of reasoning in
every walk of life (and is why establishment dates are so common in
branding); the fact that it is technically illogical does not mean that it
does not exert persuasive power (drawn from social and cultural norms)
over an audience that a rhetor might therefore be able to use. The ad
populum fallacy, to furnish another example, is a Greco-Roman rhetorical
formulation of what we now call, in a social psychology/behavioural eco-
nomics framing, social proof (Cialdini, 2001). We know that social proof,
the idea that we should do something because we see other people doing
it, holds a powerful hold on humans; so powerful, indeed, that it is a
regular target of early socialisation and education (‘would you stick your
hand in the fire just because your friends do?’, etc., ad nauseam). Yet,
despite constant admonitions, repeated personal experience, and its early
inclusion on rhetoric’s ‘most wanted’ list of logical fallacies, we still get
trapped by it every day—and we still use it ourselves in our own argu-
mentation. Indeed, is not the very premise of this book based on the
spirit of the ad populum—the foundational paper of S-D logic has a vast

number of citations, making it a highly popular paper in the discipline,
therefore it should be important and we should examine its rhetorical
strategies? So, in rhetorical analysis, the identification of logical fallacies
is useful because it can expose persuasive strategies that rely upon power-
ful appeals to irrational ‘common sense’ reasoning.
Persuasive Style
Style is fundamental to Western rhetoric. It helps to generate ethos and

pathos and even supports the arguments of logos. As Aristotle (1991) notes
(with palpable frustration), “fitting style makes the matter persuasive; for
the mind is tricked as though the speaker were telling the truth, because
[…] even if things are not as the speaker is claiming, they think that they
are, and the listener always empathizes with the man who speaks emo-
tively, even if he is talking nonsense” (p. 229). Style, then, can make
something untrue appear true (and vice versa)—and this is because of its
effect on the perception of the audience—the style with which something
is said influences our interpretation of it. Aristotle would far rather that
the study of rhetoric not have to deal with this reality—if there was jus-
tice in the world, he notes, then we would always just stick to the facts,
but “the baseness of the audience” (p. 217), or the realities of human
interpretation, mean that facts are rarely enough on their own.
Accordingly, the study of Western rhetoric has, since its early days,
included an appreciation of a large number of stylistic devices with which
to support our arguments and strengthen our positions. Rhetorical stylis-
tics is concerned with “entirely social or audience-centered standards”
(Fahnestock, 2005, p. 218)—in such a context, style is not about self-
expression, but about what will work for a particular audience at a par-
ticular time. In marketing scholarship, for example, an author seeking to
use rhetorical style would consider the acceptable style of the journal they
were submitting to and the stylistic devices that would be judged appro-
priate by its readership. Such evaluations require familiarity with the gen-
eral style of the journal and its typical outputs and, indeed, this type of
knowledge is something that as scholars we tend to absorb and then
50 C. Miles
reproduce often quite unconsciously. This does not make it any less essen-
tial to the business of writing scholarly material, though, or any less
important in the construction of a persuasive, appropriate, academic
argument.
In the sections below, I will outline the major elements of rhetorical
stylistics that will be encountered in the analysis in later chapters.
Rhetorical style is often divided between tropes and schemes. Lanham
(1991) summarises the broad weight of opinion on this matter in the fol-
lowing way; a trope is a figure “that changes the meaning of a word or
words”, while a schema is “the placing of a word in a highly artificial pat-
tern” (p. 155). But then he notes that the distinction is often quite mean-
ingless. Given that it is, nevertheless, a quite common distinction to
make in the literature, it is one that I will be occasionally referring to in
the upcoming chapters, and in this outline, I will first discuss tropes and
then move on to schemes.
Word Choice
Word choice is one of the most basic persuasive tools that we have at our
disposal. As Aristotle (1991) notes, there is a difference “in saying ‘rosy-
fingered dawn’ rather than ‘purple-fingered’ dawn or, even worse, ‘red-
fingered dawn’” (p. 221) or in calling actors “the flatterers of Dionysus,
while they call themselves artists” (p. 220). Words have connotations,
associated meanings that might be negative or positive for the intended
audience and therefore can be used accordingly to evoke particular pathos
reactions. Words can be chosen from a wide variety of persuasive perspec-
tives. For example, Fahnestock (2011) argues that “with its composite
lexicon, English offers its users a rich array of choices and synonyms that
tend to cluster […] in three levels: the Anglo-Saxon core, the French
additions beginning with the Normans, and the direct borrowings from
Latin and Greek […]”. Words from these three levels are then associated
by “English users” with “differences in persuasive appeals: the familiar,
the elevated, the erudite” (p. 39). So, choosing words that have Latin or
Greek roots generates the impression that your speech is erudite. In addi-
tion to ‘language of origin’ choices, there are opportunities to adopt
words from other domains which might carry credibility or prestige with
the audience (in the case of marketing scholarship, that might involve
importing terms from the hard sciences, for example). The ‘newness’ of
words is also something that can have a persuasive effect. As Fahnestock
(2011) notes, “in contemporary English, at the service of a culture driven
by fads and an economy fueled by innovation, new words abound, and
they are persuasive in themselves as signs of new items, ideas, and ideolo-
gies” (p. 58). So, rhetorical analysis will often investigate key words in a
piece of writing—words that appear to be central to the argument being
made, that might be repeated often or highlighted in central areas of
argumentation. The question that the analyst asks will always be some
variation of “why this word rather than any of the other choices the author
could have made, what makes this word the most persuasive here?”
M
etaphor
Perhaps the most well-known of all the tropes is metaphor—“changing a

word from its literal meaning to one not properly applicable but analo-
gous to it” (Lanham, 1991, p. 100), or “bringing over a term from an
‘alien’ lexical/semantic field to create a novel pairing that expresses a point
trenchantly” (Fahnestock, 2011, p. 104). As Kennedy (1994) points out,
the Greek word that is used to signify this process, metaphora (which
means ‘carrying over’) is itself a metaphor (just like many other rhetorical
terms). Lakoff and Johnson (2003), indeed, remind us that, “metaphor is
pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action”
(p. 3). So much of our conceptualising about the world is done with the
help of metaphor, by bringing in comparisons from other semantic fields
in order to enlighten our thinking and provide fresh perspectives.
Metaphor epitomises reasoning by “analogy” and from a rhetorical per-
spective that is its “distinct argumentative work” (Fahnestock, 2011,
p. 105), but the vividness of a good analogical comparison can also help
to make it memorable and, in the words of Aristotle (1991), “bring the
matter before the audience’s eyes” (p. 221).
The importance of metaphor in marketing thought has been widely
recognised (Scully, 1996; O’Reilly, 2000; Cornelissen, 2003; Hirschman,
52 C. Miles
2007; Tuominen, 2007; Fillis & Rentschler, 2008; O’Malley et al., 2008;
Capelli and Jolibert, 2009; Miles, 2014; Brown and Wijland, 2018).
Metaphor provides the basis for key marketing concepts such as the prod-
uct life cycle, brand personality, segmentation, targeting, and position-
ing, viral marketing, the marketing mix, and relationship marketing. It
clearly has an important role to play in the acceptability and credibility of
marketing ideas. The nature of the metaphors that are used in marketing
scholarship, what their origins are, how they might appeal to the intended
audience, the trace of how they evolve in parallel with the growth of the
concepts they illuminate, are all features of the landscape of academic
discourse that demand careful rhetorical analysis. And note how that pre-
vious sentence uses at least nine metaphorical constructions (nature, ori-
gins, tracing, evolve, parallel, growth, illuminate, landscape, demand)—so
much of our language is analogically constructed that it is often difficult
to see just how much “metaphorical saturation” (McCloskey, 1985, p. 75)
there is in our disciplinary and professional talk. So, rhetorical analysis
will attempt to identify and investigate the key metaphors in a piece of
marketing communication, those that contribute most significantly to
the persuasiveness of the overall argument.
Metonymy & Synecdoche
Fahnestock (1999) writes of the “dominance of metaphor” in studies

seeking to examine the role of language in professional and scholarly dis-
course, commenting that “a common denominator in all these studies is
that, in investigating metaphor, scholars and researchers believe they have
a window on a fundamental, generative cognitive process” (p. 4).
However, as a consequence, she argues, this has “taken attention away
from other possible conceptual and heuristic resources that are also iden-
tifiable formal features in texts and that also come from the same tradi-
tion that produced metaphor” (p. 6). One good example of this is the
comparative paucity of rhetorical and critical discourse analysis that takes
time to focus on the trope of metonymy. This might be because it is a
slightly trickier figure to identify; indeed, Brown and Wijland (2018)
note the regularity with which it is lumped together with metaphor in

marketing scholarship.
In contrast with metaphor, metonymy deals with “substitutions with
terms chosen according to some recoverable, specific principle of associa-
tion” (Fahnestock, 2011, p. 101), or “letting a thing merely associated
with the thing in question stand as symbol of it” (McCloskey, 1985,
p. 84). So, in analysing a particular speech made by Barack Obama,
Charteris-Black (2018) notes his antithetical arrangement of the phrases,
‘Wall Street’ and ‘Main Street’, the former “a metonym for corporate
values (via big business in the American metropolis)” and the latter “a
metonym for community values (via small business in the American
small town)” (p. 54). Metonymy often has the rhetorical effect of aggre-
gating a whole domain under one particular designation and this can be
useful when attempting to downplay nuance, difference, dissent, and
fragmentation within such a domain. When one uses the metonymy,
‘Wall Street’, for example, the whole of the US financial industry is trans-
formed into one homogeneous entity—thinking the same, acting the
same, with the same interests and strategies. ‘Wall Street’ is a metonymy
because it takes something that is associated with US finance and uses it
to stand in for it. Wall Street is not a part of US finance—it just happens
to be the street upon which historically many financial interests have
been located. Madison Avenue is similarly used as a metonymy to refer to
the US advertising with the same aggregating, flattening effect. Brown
and Wijland (2018) argue that “marketing is heavily reliant on met-
onymical postulates” (p. 336)—“every sample survey, for example, repre-
sents a much bigger population […] every case study contains lessons,
implicitly at least, that can be applied, adapted or extrapolated to analo-
gous situations […] every study of consumer tribes or similar social
groups is characterised by metonymical compression into neat, tidy and
appropriately holophrastic categories such as “bikers”, “hipsters”, “skin-
heads”, “rednecks”, “slummy mummies”, “Sloan Rangers” and suchlike”
(ibid.). Broadly, the metonymical impulse can be seen in any attempt to
aggregate, label, or stereotype. Practical marketing is awash with such
processes, precisely because they are communicatively efficient and
engaging (whilst at the same time being potentially dangerous in their
54 C. Miles
oversimplifications and strategic lack of nuance), and so too is marketing

scholarship.
A very close cousin of metonymy (so close that they are often mis-
taken) is synecdoche, which occurs when we use a part for whole substitu-
tion or vice versa. So, while both figures operate through substitution, the
difference lies in what they are substituting. Traditionally, synecdoche
“specifies part/whole or singular/plural substitutions” while metonymy
has been characterised as substituting across a wide variety of categories
such as “inventor for the thing invented”, “author for work”, “container
for the contained”, “cause for effect”, and “location for the thing”
(Fahenstock, 2011, pp. 102–3). The hierarchy of the relationship between
synecdoche and metonymy has occasionally come in for discussion, with
Lakoff and Johnson (2003) describing synecdoche as a “special case of
metonymy” (p. 36), a sub-categorisation that rhetorical studies scholar-
ship has not been keen to embrace, though Lanham (1991) does some-
what muddy the waters noting (separately) that both metonymy and
synecdoche are characterised by manipulation or change of scale. We will
return to the differences in Chap. 3 when we discuss the importance of
metonymy in Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) foundational paper.
In consideration of how important tropes such as metaphor, meton-
ymy and synecdoche are in the construction of persuasive discourse,
Martin (2014) explains that they are “powerful devices for stylistically
shaping not just the tone but also the content of an argument, because
they permit speakers to redescribe situations, objects, agents or experi-
ences in selective ways that subtly shape how judgements about them are
to be made” (p. 80.). We will see that all three tropes have significant
parts to play in making S-D logic’s argumentation both engaging and
convincing.
Repetition and Patterning
Moving on to the schemes, we might start with Lanham’s (1991) defini-

tion that they involve “the placing of a word in a highly artificial pattern”
(p. 154). Artificiality here means that the resulting phrase does not sound
as if it came from unconsidered, off-the cuff, quotidian conversation. It
draws attention to itself because it does not sound like ‘normal’ speech—
indeed, pattern is something that we do not normally attend to when
going about our conversational day, so much so that when someone does,
by accident, produce a sentence that contains alliteration, assonance,
antithesis, or regular repetition of some sort, our attention is immediately
attracted to it and its apparent artificiality. But at the same time, this can
mean that persuasive discourse using such schemes (in a considered,
appropriate manner) can call attention to important phrases, helping to
make them memorable and effective. Furthermore, patterning can help
to produce (at different scales depending on the particular schemes used)
a strong sense of rhythm in a piece of writing or a delivered speech.
Rhythm sets up expectations that can then be played to, or played against
for further effect.
“Repetition”, argues Farnsworth (2011), “is one of the most important
general ideas in rhetoric” (p. 3). When we repeat words, phrases, or even
fragments of words (as in alliteration’s repetition of initial letters of suc-
cessive words) “we seem to stay on the same subject and make a place for
that subject in the imperfect memories of [our] listeners” (Fahnestock,
1999, p. 157) and when that repetition is expressed in writing we also
“provide visual chains across a text” (ibid.) that serve to link the elements
of our argument together. Through repetition and reversal, the schemes
can also lend an “incantatory” (Fahnestock, 1999, p. 158) feeling, mak-
ing “the mundane seem otherworldly or more meaningful than we other-
wise think” (Martin, 2014, p. 75).
Some of the most common examples of schemes are:
• Alliteration: the repetition of the first sound or letter of several words.

The classic Marketing Mix of Product, Place, Price, and Promotion
being the most obvious marketing example of this rhetorical pattern.
• Anaphora: repeating the same word(s) at the start of successive clauses
(or sentences). Perhaps the most famous modern usage of this figure is
found in Dr Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech”, “which is
known by that name because those words are repeated at the start of
eight sentences in a row” (Farnsworth, 2011, p. 16). The ‘opposite’ of
this figure, involving the repetition of the same words at the end of
successive clauses or sentences is known as epistrophe.
56 C. Miles
• Polysyndeton: the excessive repetition of conjunctions (‘and’, ‘but’,

‘or’, etc.) between clauses in a sentence. Lanham (1991) provides an
illustration taken from Milton’s Paradise Lost, where the poet describes
how Satan “pursues his way, / And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps,
or flies”. The ‘opposite’ scheme is asyndeton, which strips the conjunc-
tions from successive clauses, and can create a sense of accelerat-
ing emphasis.
• Antithesis: a figure of reversal or contrast rather than repetition, antith-
esis is defined by Lanham (1991) as “conjoining contrasting ideas”
(p. 16), and by Fahnestock (2011) as when “two parallel phrases or
clauses feature words that an audience would recognise as opposites”
(p. 232). So, ‘the key to marketing is to offer value, not seek profit’.
• Antimetabole: another form of reversal in which parallel phrasing
“retains the same key terms but switches their relative positions in the
paired units” (Fahnestock, 2011, p. 234). One of the most used mod-
ern examples of this figure comes from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural
speech, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can
do for your country”.
Such schemes as those outlined above might be quite common in

political oratory and marketing copywriting but draw too much atten-
tion to themselves to be considered appropriate style in objective, infor-
mative social science scholarship outside of very occasional usage. The
long legacy of the Royal Society and its plain language reforms for scien-
tific writing continues to mean that artificiality is something to be very
carefully guarded against in empirical scholarship. Those marketing
scholars who do use schemes heavily in their work (Stephen Brown is a
good example) are often doing so deliberately to mock the absurdity of
such plain language traditions and the scientific pretensions that domi-
nate the discipline (and from an exuberant love of language play).
Interestingly, Vargo and Lusch have quite regularly used alliteration in
the titles for their papers; Lusch & Vargo’s (2006a) ‘Service-dominant
logic: reactions, reflections and refinements’, Lusch & Vargo’s (2006b)
‘The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing: Dialog, Debate, and
Directions, Lusch & Vargo’s (2014) ‘Service-Dominant Logic: Premises,

Perspectives, Possibilities’, Vargo & Lusch’s (2013) ‘Service Dominant
Logic: Prologue and Prospects’, Vargo’s (2007) ‘Paradigms, Pluralisms,
and Peripheries: On the Assessment of the S-D Logic’, and Vargo’s (2008)
‘Customer Integration and Value Creation: Paradigmatic Traps and
Perspectives’. Whilst it is certainly not the case that the authors adopt an
alliterative approach to all of their titling, it is clear that the scheme of
alliteration is a figure that Vargo and Lusch have found useful in attract-
ing attention and constructing a sense of conceptual consistency. The fact
that Vargo has used this in his own solo-authored work is a good indica-
tion that he is the source of this rhetorical habit and it is heartening to see
such an explicit attention to persuasive stylistics in one of the co-founders
of the logic I will be analysing in the upcoming chapters.
Much of the time, because academic work in the social sciences has to
tread carefully in its use of artificial style (as it breaks the illusion that we
are involved in a sober search for objective truth that has no truck with
the persuasive), the schemes tend to be kept to a minimum. However,
there is one scheme that is very often to be found, and that is parallelism
or the creation of resemblance of language and/or structure across clauses,
sentences, paragraphs, and even sections of scholarly writing. Fahnestock
(2011) explains that “parallel structure equalizes or coordinates content,
and this equalizing can have persuasive consequences as listeners and
readers ‘consume’ statements formed into similar units” (p. 224). In the
writing of marketing scholarship, parallelism can be found often in the
strategic construction of bullet points, the delivery of similar information
across different formats within the same paper (figures, tables, and text,
for example), the building up of the same argument in different ways,
and the use of parallel cases to predict a further instance (termed eduction
in rhetoric).
We will encounter a number of ways in which schemes of patterning
and repetition are used to persuasive effect in Vargo and Lusch’s explica-
tion and promotion of the Service-Dominant logic. Both trope and
schema provide powerful stylistic means to galvanise attention, direct
engagement, and generate an energy in argumentation that can play a
more influential role in convincing an audience than the presentation of
evidence or logical reasoning.
58 C. Miles
Kairos
Across our discussion so far of the elements of rhetoric, we have often

seen that a consideration of what is appropriate at any one time and for
any one audience is a guiding principle in terms of how we recruit the
artistic proofs and the stylistic devices that we amplify our arguments
with. What works to persuade an audience of football fans will not neces-
sarily be effective in moving an audience of marketing academics.
Furthermore, what might work to influence an audience of marketing
scholars in the 1990s will not necessarily be convincing to even those
same scholars assembled ten years later. Rhetorical argumentation is con-
tingent, in other words. Our decisions are dependent upon trying to sat-
isfy the expectations of the audience—we should always be looking to
them to judge the appropriateness of our tropes, schemes, delivery, argu-
ments, etc. The Roman authors, Cicero and Quintilian, made this a cen-
tral concern of their rhetorical systems and called it the study of decorum.
This focus on appropriateness is very much to be found in the Aristotelian
explication of rhetoric, where it is called prepon. However, Aristotle also
talks of a further situational or environmental component, one that he
inherits from the Sophist, Gorgias, and that is the concept of kairos, often
translated as ‘timeliness’. While we must be mindful of the expectations
that the audience bring to our persuasive discourse we must also be aware
of the rhetorical ‘moment’ that it is happening in. There have been two
opposing views expressed in modern rhetorical theory in relation to the
issue of how the rhetor relates to the rhetorical situation. Bitzer (1968)
sees the rhetorical situation as something that a speaker needs to respond
to—indeed, “it is the situation that calls the discourse into existence”
(p. 2). Vatz (1973), however, objects that “no situation can ever have a
nature independent of the perception of the interpreter or independent
of the rhetoric with which he chooses to characterize it” (p. 154).
Accordingly, rather than the situation dictating the rhetoric, Vatz holds
that it is the rhetorical choices that are made by the rhetor that end up
constructing the interpretation of the situation by the audiences, and
therefore defining the nature of the situation—“meaning is not discov-
ered in situations, but created by rhetors” (p. 157). The tension here
between a positivist (or what Vatz calls a “‘realist’ philosophy of mean-

ing”) and a social constructionist viewpoint should be a familiar one to
marketing scholars with a knowledge of the discipline’s paradigm wars of
the last decades of the twentieth century. However, it is clear that both
Vatz (1973) and Bitzer (1968) recognise the way that rhetors are inti-
mately bound to the persuasive moment (kairos), whether that moment
creates them or they create it. In Chap. 3 I shall examine in some depth
the ‘moment’ of S-D logic’s foundational paper and we shall indeed see
that it is a highly nuanced one involving perspectives that are redolent of
both Vatz (1973) and Bitzer’s (1968) positions. Like all scholarship, mar-
keting scholarship must consider how it places itself in time (its relation-
ship to past scholarship and therefore the present state of the literature),
and it must always build a convincing case for its significance to the
future of the discipline. Yet, some of the most successful scholarship is far
more aware of how its own rhetorical creation of its place in time, its
scholarly ‘moment’, can be of profound significance for its acceptance
and valorisation by the audience.
Visual Rhetoric
Having introduced some of the most common components in the rhe-
torical toolbox it is time to move on to their application in the analysis of
the discourse of Service-Dominant logic. However, just before we do so,
it is necessary to briefly discuss an issue that might well have occurred to
the reader—rhetoric is based upon words (in speech and writing) and yet
so much of our modern professional and disciplinary lives are mediated
through visuals (images, gifs, videos, charts, infographics, emojis, etc.).
How can we explore the persuasive nature of discourse if rhetoric only
engages with the verbal side of it?
Although rhetoric has historically tended to have an emphasis on the
verbal (natural, given its origins in persuasive public address), even from
the very early days of rhetorical thinking there has been an appreciation
of how the visual (posture, gesture, facial expression) can contribute to a
persuasive message. However, it was not until the 1970 National
Conference on Rhetoric that a “formal call [was] made to include visual
60 C. Miles
images in the study of rhetoric” (Foss, 2005, p. 141). Since that time
there has certainly been a strong shift towards considering visual and,
more broadly, material artefacts as objects of rhetorical analysis. This has
produced a very large body of work exploring the visual rhetoric of a wide
variety of discourse, from Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Foss,
1986) and Shepard Fairey’s iconic Obama Hope graphic (Gries, 2015), to
Bin Laden’s visual propaganda (O’Shaughnessy, 2002) and the chart junk
of corporate reports (Greenwood et al., 2019).
Foss (2005) argues that “visual rhetoric is the actual image that the
rhetors generate when they use visual symbols for the purpose of com-
municating” (p. 143). Now, of course, one might wonder just how sig-
nificant the use of visual symbols could be in regard to the artefacts of
marketing scholarship? The pages of the sorts of prestigious journals that
the core development of S-D logic has occurred in since 2004 are not the
sorts of venues where one expects much use of visual communication.
However, that is not quite the case, as a quick browse through any recent
volume of the Journal of Marketing will demonstrate. There are many
diagrams, figures, tables, and even the odd illustration. While these ele-
ments might well have verbal/textual aspects, they are still working visu-
ally as well. Professional marketers make great use of visuals in their
communication to both internal and external stakeholders and academic
marketers are very similar. Indeed, so many of the basic principles that we
teach and use in our research are metaphors that are best expressed visu-
ally: the ‘sales funnel’ and the ‘product life cycle’ being obvious examples.
The foundational discourse of Service-Dominant logic has its own share
of figures and tables that play a part in the creation of a persuasive and
dynamic case. In the upcoming chapters, alongside my consideration of
the textual side of that discourse, I will be paying attention to how visual
components work within it and thinking about how they play into (or
sometimes against) the expectations of the audience.
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3
Rhetoric and the Agonistic Moment
of S-D Logic
Any rhetorical consideration of S-D logic must start with a detailed

exploration of the founding document of the approach, Vargo and Lusch’s
2004 Journal of Marketing article, ‘Evolving to a New Dominant Logic
for Marketing’ (hereafter referred to as V&L, 2004). This is not only the
paper that started it all but it is also the paper that remains the most cited
of all publications across the florescence of scholarship that it has inspired.
Later chapters will look at the ways in which Vargo and Lusch evolved
their rhetorical strategies over the years as well as how they dealt with
introducing new perspectives and how they have sought to curate a strong
online presence for the logic, but in this chapter I shall focus entirely on
the complex and sophisticated rhetorical gambits that serve as a frame-
work for the first presentation of the Service-Dominant logic. The first of
these gambits is the way Vargo and Lusch use history—V&L (2004) is,
as already noted, a paper that spends its first half constructing a narrative
of marketing history. This narrative is very much a rhetorical “descrip-
tion” in Potter’s (2005) terms—it presents us with an account of market-
ing’s origins and evolution that has persuasive purpose for an argument
about what marketing should look like, or how we should look at mar-
keting, now and in the future. Alongside this use of history, the paper also
adopts a number of key metaphors that have powerful effects on the way

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46510-9_3
70 C. Miles
that we interpret that history and Vargo and Lusch’s arguments concern-
ing how we should interpret it. Many of these metaphors have continued
to be central to explications of S-D logic even as its premises and empha-
ses have developed and altered and I will be carefully analysing the way
that the foundational paper establishes these important devices. In addi-
tion, V&L (2004) contains a number of figures and tables that demand
to be explored from the position of their visual rhetoric. What we use
such visual elements for in scholarly writing, how we choose to design
them and lay them out, what information we decide to include and what
we leave out, are all decisions that have rhetorical motivations—we want
our tables and figures to persuade in their clarity and precision, after all.
An investigation into the ways in which visual rhetoric contributes to the
success of the paper is essential, then. Finally, I will consider the broader
use of patterning in V&L (2004). The construction of repeating patterns
in verbal and visual discourse is an important component of rhetorical
style—establishing and playing with such patterns allows us to attract
and direct attention, imply connection, as well as appeal to our aesthetic
and emotional senses—and they have a role in helping to generate pow-
erful scholarly writing just as they do in poetry, political speeches, and
advertising copy.
However, before we consider the rhetorical strategies to be found in
V&L (2004) we need to consider the audiences of the paper, the people
who are responding to those strategies. For, if we think of rhetoric as the
production of discourse that has “the capacity to move someone else”
(Ott & Dickinson, 2013, p. 2), in any attempt to analyse the nature of a
piece of rhetorical discourse we must always ask ourselves who is that
‘someone else’ that its strategies of persuasion are meant to move?
Different audiences at different times will be moved by different things—
the successful rhetor reacts to these variables in their generation of rhe-
torical discourse. The bulk of Part II of Aristotle’s On Rhetoric is given
over to discussing the different human emotions that might predominate
in different types of audience and instructing the persuasive speaker how
to alter their appeals accordingly. As Kjeldsen (2018) puts it, “rhetori-
cians have always been thinking about audiences”.
The Audiences of the Foundational Paper

So, for whom is V&L (2004) written for? In order to make the explora-
tion of this question as nuanced as possible, it is worth remembering
Barbara Stern’s (1994) use of reception theory in her revised communica-
tion model for advertising. Stern notes that an advertisement has more
than the obvious ‘target audience’ recipient. First, there is the client, after
all, who is the initial recipient and arbiter of whether an advertising exe-
cution will see the light of day or not. Then, there is the ‘internal’ repre-
sentation of the recipient in the advert—the dramatic rendering of the
stand-in for the actual consumer. Then, finally, we get to that ‘actual
consumer’, who may or may not recognise themselves as the intended
recipient for the communication and might receive it in a variety of ways
(some of which might be quite contrary to those planned by its creators).
Taking a leaf out Stern’s book, let us consider, generically, all the audi-
ences that Vargo and Lusch had to ‘move’ with their paper. First we have
the editor (and perhaps associate editor) of the Journal of Marketing when
they originally submitted the piece. Then they have the peer reviewers
that they must contend with in order to achieve publication. Then they
have the initial readership on publication (those who subscribe to the
title or who make a regular point of reading through each issue) followed
by what we might call the audience of posterity (those who read the
article as a result of coming across it as a citation, recommendation, or
through some form of directed search over the many years after its
publication).
In further identifying and deepening our understanding of these dif-
ferent audiences, we are helped immensely by the foreword written for
Lusch and Vargo’s (2006) edited collection on S-D logic by Ruth Bolton,
the final JoM editor for V&L (2004). Bolton (2006) describes how the
manuscript went through “an unusually lengthy review and revision pro-
cess that spanned five years and the tenure of two Journal editors” (p. ix).
In total, Vargo and Lusch worked through five revisions for the JoM—a
tremendous exercise in patience and determination to which any scholar
will attest. This remarkably difficult birth for a paper that has gone on to
be so successful is not so surprising, given the findings of the by now
72 C. Miles
quite large literature researching the academic peer-review process. As

Brown (1995) notes, in his wonderful exploration of the marketing jour-
nal reviewing process, this body of research had early on uncovered the
fact that “manuscripts rejected by the leading journals often turn out to
be the ones with the greatest long-term influence” (p. 693). Studies of the
review process have generally tended to indicate that, “referees are unreli-
able, in so far as the degree of agreement between different reviewers of
the same manuscript is very low indeed” (ibid.). Brezis and Birukou
(2020), for example, found that “the ratings of peer review are not robust,
and that altering reviewers leads to a dramatic impact on the ranking of
the papers”, while noting that “innovative works are not highly ranked in
the existing peer review process, and in consequence are often rejected”
(p. 393). Consequently, experience with the peer review process in a dis-
cipline means authors will inevitably write their initial manuscript drafts
with reviewers in mind. Indeed, given the small pool of scholars working
in many sub-areas of a discipline, authors can often tend to predict actual
individual reviewers. They will craft their language, style, argumentation,
and citation matrix with an eye to the imaginary reviewer in their head.
Rhetoric is key here, as argued by Shelby Hunt in his contribution to
Brown et al. (2018): “good rhetorical strategy requires authors to antici-
pate reviewers’ potential rejection-reasons and then to counter-argue
those reasons in the original manuscript and subsequent revision”
(p. 1348). A five year, five revision review process points to some serious
issues regarding Vargo and Lusch’s success in embedding into their evolv-
ing manuscript counter arguments to rejection-reasons that successfully
persuaded their reviewers and the two editors. According to Bolton
(2006), the reviewers “challenged the authors to deepen and refine their
perspective on a new dominant logic” (p. ix). According to Lusch and
Vargo (2006) in their preface to the same edited collection, the “normal,
somewhat regressive review process” meant that their paper “had not
been as creative as possible” (p. xvii). The journey involved in “trying
hard to get things right” clearly involved a substantial degree of listening
to and responding to feedback from this initial audience of reviewers and
editors. This means, of course, that the published version of the paper is
the result of a long rhetorical conversation across a number of voices.
While we cite it as Vargo and Lusch (2004), the peer review process
means that the editors and anonymous reviewers have had a significant
influence on the form, argumentation, and style of the final paper. The
audience has become part of the authorial team. From a rhetorical point
of view, this has important ramifications, ramifications that also speak
directly to one of the foundational premises of S-D logic, namely, the
co-creation of value. Peer reviewers and editors, if their part in the schol-
arly review process is played well, should be co-creators of the final pub-
lished piece, a piece that is better for their contributions.
Of course, it is possible for reviewers to insist on changes and revision-
ings that, in the view of the primary authors, make the final piece less
than it could have been. Peer review can often be a negotiation between
reviewers, editors, and authors in which each voice seeks to argue for the
primacy of their vision of the manuscript (or the manuscript’s poten-
tial)—and this can mean that the final published artefact is very much a
negotiated piece. Something that the authors of the original submission
might never have produced on their own (after all, if they could have,
why didn’t they?). All of this makes of the peer-reviewed piece of schol-
arly writing something quite distinct from other forms of writing that we
might engage in. Indeed, Parfitt (2012) argues that the peer review “pro-
cess generates a distinct genre in response to a rhetorical situation” (p. 1).
When scholars “receive reviews of their work, they are presented with
multiple voices, opinions, and often requests asking the author to respond
by prioritizing statements of critique they deem most useful for the given
purpose and audience” (p. 2). Authors then need to work out how to
incorporate these requests while maintaining “awareness of their project’s
purpose” and this also involves “assessing their peer reviews through basic
rhetorical analysis” (ibid.). In other words, we read our peer reviews in
order to uncover their intent, their persuasive motivation. We reconstruct
their argumentation, we interrogate their meanings, we unravel their
metaphors, all with the goal of revising the manuscript in such a way that
it will accord with their recommendations, without losing too much of
the fundamental “purpose” of the piece as we have originally conceived it.
Parfitt’s argument that responding to peer review involves a basic form of
rhetorical analysis is convincing but it also helps us realise that the review-
ers themselves are involved in their own rhetorical analysis—their own
attempt to critique the structure, argumentation, language and style of
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the submitted manuscript. As Berkenkotter (1995) states, scholarly peer

review is a “dynamic rhetorical form” that is, at its root, “adversarial”
(p. 248). The “new knowledge claims” that a journal submission presents,
“must be held up for close and critical scrutiny—to be contested and
negotiated and finally declared by the editor to pass (or not to pass) mus-
ter” (ibid.).
So, with all this in mind, what fresh light might we shed on the sub-
stance of the “dynamic rhetorical form” that those five years and five revi-
sions took? We do not know all the reviewers that worked with Vargo and
Lusch during that period and we do not, naturally, have access to the
correspondence that they generated. The final published paper is the
static output of that dynamic rhetorical relationship. There are, though,
a few places that we might look for its traces. Firstly, a rhetorical analysis
of the text itself (as I will provide below) might well throw up elements of
argumentation, form, style and language choice that seem to be best
explained as artefacts of contestation and negotiation (to use Berkenkotter’s
terms). Secondly, the ways in which Vargo and Lusch change and adapt
the details of S-D logic, particularly in their writing in the immediate
years after the foundational 2004 paper, might be able to suggest to us
those areas where the authors felt their creativity had been suppressed.
We will be investigating the course of those changes in Chap. 4. Finally,
there is the existence of the extraordinary invited commentaries that
accompanied the publication of the 2004 article (Day et al., 2004). These
were invited by Bolton “with the goal of stimulating public discussion
and debate” (Bolton, 2006, p. ix) and featured contributions by some of
the biggest marketing scholars of the day—George Day, John Deighton
and Das Narayandas, Evert Gummesson, Shelby Hunt, C. K. Prahalad,
Roland Rust, and Steven Shugan. It would not be illogical to suppose
that somewhere amongst this list of correspondents are a couple of the
reviewers of the original manuscript. Indeed, we do know that George
Day and Roland Rust were reviewers under Bolton’s management of the
manuscript (Bolton, 2019). It would be an editorially sensible negotia-
tion tactic to offer a reviewer who still had qualms about the piece an
opportunity to publicly express those alongside the published article.
Presenting those qualms as part of an invited commentary from a num-
ber of other scholars would also serve to maintain some degree of
anonymity. Certainly, the facts of the incredibly long review process and
the existence of the invited commentaries speak to the contentiousness of
Vargo and Lusch’s message and its propensity to generate extended adver-
sarial rhetorical relationships, as well as supportive ones.
Indeed, even if the invited commentators did not include any of the
peer reviewers, we are still left with a situation where there is a second
iteration of the primary audience—the first iteration being the peer
reviewers who get to see and influence the manuscript before publication
and the second iteration being the invited commentators who get to see
the manuscript before publication and are then able to publicly respond
to the manuscript at publication. The commentators are a public audi-
ence, as it were, who play out their reading, interpretation, and response
in front of the final, ‘actual readers’ (to adapt Stern’s terminology). Their
presence thus forms a rhetorical argument around the 2004 paper—they
attest to its significance and so amplify its ethos. No matter whether a
particular commentator is positive or negative in their evaluation of
Vargo and Lusch’s argument, the simple fact that they have been asked to
publicly comment on it by the editor of the Journal of Marketing forms a
clear case for its importance. This is not a rhetorical strategy that can be
realistically attributed to Vargo and Lusch—though it certainly makes
sense to see it as an output of the “dynamic rhetorical form” that they
co-created with the reviewers and editors of their manuscript. As a rhe-
torical strategy it would seem to reflect Ruth Bolton’s natural desire as an
editor to aid in making the piece’s appearance in the journal as resonant
as possible, to “provoke a variety of reactions from readers”, as she sates in
her preamble to the commentaries (Day et al., 2004, p. 18). As Vargo
(2019) reflects, “clearly, these commentaries were attention-provoking
for the article” (p. 194.)
So, along with the amplification of the article’s ethos, the commentar-
ies also serve to reproduce, extend, and transmit the ‘contestation and
negotiation’ of the review process. The paper both gestates and then is
born in contention—in what a rhetorician might call agon. As Hawhee
(2002, 2004) has argued, this term was used by the Ancient Greeks to
refer to “the contest, the encounter that produces struggle and change”
(2002, p. 185). Such an encounter could be in the wrestling ring, on the
running track, or in the competitive rhetorical displays that were a
76 C. Miles
feature of the panhellenic festivals (Tell, 2011). Yet, Hawhee’s point is

that we should be careful in glossing the term as a simple “synonym for
competition” (Hawhee, 2002, p. 185), for which the term athlios is more
appropriate. Instead, she argues, what is important in agon is the encoun-
ter itself, the way in which the “questing” (Hawhee, 2004, p. 27) struggle
between two contestants can improve both of them. Centrally, this
improvement through contest, the creative florescence that struggle can
bring, comes from the parts played by virtue and reputation in the Greek
conception of agon. The reason for taking part in contestation is to be
able to demonstrate one’s virtue to the judges, the audience, and your
opponents—the more virtue you are able to show in the course of the
struggle the greater, then, your reputation becomes. Struggle is a way of
constructing and amplifying personal ethos.
Tannen (2002) has specifically attempted to “uncover agonistic ele-
ments in academic discourse and to examine their effects on our pursuit
of knowledge and on the community of scholars engaged in that pursuit”
(p. 1652), and her research is directed around her definition of agonism
as “ritualised opposition” (p. 1653). Citing the work of Walter Ong, she
argues that the roots of academic agonism go back to the Ancient Greek’s
“fascination with the adversativeness of language and thought” (Ong
cited in Tannen, 2002, p. 1654), something that other intellectual tradi-
tions do not necessarily share, pointing by way of example to ancient
Chinese approaches to conversation as a tool to maintain the precarious
balance of a diverse universe. The traditions of Greek rhetoric and argu-
mentation promote a ritualised adversarial framing to much intellectual
work and they became deeply embedded in the Western university para-
digm. As initial examples of how western scholarly practice reflects its
agonistic fundamentals, Tannen (2002) notes that “a common frame-
work for academic papers […] prescribes that authors position their work
in opposition to someone else’s, which they then prove wrong” (p. 1655).
She explains that this prescription means that an author becomes tempted
to describe and frame opponents in terms that make them easy to dismiss
or find fault with—the adversarial expectations of academia entrain such
behaviours and make us focused on looking for what is wrong in others’
arguments rather than what we might be able to learn from them. We
prove our scholarly virtue by attacking established ideas and authors, we
“‘stake out a position’ in opposition to the work of an established scholar”

(p. 1658).
For Tannen (2002), the agonistic character of much scholarly discourse
is a weakness—it “obscures the complexity of research”, the “aspects of
disparate work that overlap and can learn from each other”, and the
dichotomies that it generates “imply that only one framework can apply,
when in the vast majority of instances, both can” (p. 1661). Hawhee
(2002, 2004), while concentrating on the creative, generative nature of
agonistic struggle is very much concerned to frame this as an Ancient
Greek attitude—she is not advocating for the concept of agon to be
embedded in the modern classroom or boardroom, for example. Yet, in
uncovering how “from Protagoras’s time, rhetoric and athletics would
come to share a peculiar vocabulary, with archaic wrestling terms wend-
ing their way into the classical rhetorical taxonomy”, Hawhee (2002,
p. 197) reminds us, as does Tannen, of how the idea of proving the virtue
of one’s argument (and oneself ) through the fire of contestation is so
fundamental to the western scholarly mindset, based as it on Classical
models of disputation and the search for truth.
In later chapters, I will examine in more depth some of the wider rami-
fications of the agonistic paradigm as we consider the substance of some
of S-D logic’s foundational premises as well as the evolution of Vargo and
Lusch’s thinking over time. In considering the audiences for V&L (2004),
however, what is certainly noticeable at this time is the way in which the
presentation of the paper alongside commentaries from marketing schol-
arship heavyweights institutes an agonistic framing. I have called this an
extension of the agonism of the review process, but for the actual audi-
ence of JoM readers (who were not privy to the story behind Vargo and
Lusch’s manuscript) this is the first sight they have of the S-D mindset
and it is one that presents it as an agonistic moment—an event, a spec-
tacle, a contest of minds in which the arguments of S-D logic are tested
against the commentaries of domain experts. While many of those experts
are congratulatory and encouraging many also are cautionary or take the
opportunity to underline how their own work prefigures or subsumes
that of Vargo and Lusch. However, any reader that comes to V&L (2004)
outside of the very traditional manner of reading through (or at least
scanning through) the actual entire issue of the journal in which the
78 C. Miles
paper appears is not going to come across the invited commentaries.

Contemporary scholars search for specific terms (or even specific papers
they have come across as citations) on Google, Google Scholar, or the
specific library databases to which their institutions subscribe. They rarely
‘consume’ an entire issue of a journal unless they have a published article
in it (and therefore are curious about the context of their publication) or
are reading it because it is a special issue containing papers around a topic
they are interested in. This inevitably decreases the rhetorical role of the
commentaries in the modern digital space, although it makes it all the
more interesting to consider that Vargo and Lusch reproduced and
expanded aspects of Bolton’s agonistic framing when they published the
collection of essays discussing S-D logic from an even wider selection of
luminaries in Lusch and Vargo (2006).
Elements of agonism are to be found in the text of V&L (2004) itself,
though they are not unproblematic and exist in tension with aspects of
the discourse that seem to speak of non-adversarial forms of collabora-
tion. Much of this tension is focused around the ways that V&L (2004)
uses and presents history. It is this to which we will now turn and which
will mark the beginning of our analysis of the text itself.
hetorical History and the Creation

R
of S-D Logic
The phrase ‘rhetorical history’ has come to be used in management and
organisational studies to refer to the strategic “use of historical narratives
as organisational resources” (Foster et al., 2017, p. 1177). Managers use
the telling of a part or whole of the history of an organisation in order to
generate a rhetorically powerful narrative that they can leverage for com-
petitive advantage with stakeholders. As Suddaby et al. (2022) note,
nation states have long developed “the most sophisticated set of practices
for managing history” and have developed sophisticated rhetorical dis-
courses that create and reference ‘history’ for political, diplomatic, and
policy objectives. With V&L (2004), we are presented with an example
of how rhetorical history can be generated not just for organisational or

national advantage but also for persuasive scholarly purpose.
The title of the paper, “Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for
Marketing”, positions the ideas that it will discuss in a historical framing
right from the start. ‘Evolution’, after all, implies chronological move-
ment, from the past into the present and the future. Additionally, as I will
discuss below, evolution has clear connotations of positive movement.
What the title tells us is that marketing is going through changes (evolv-
ing implying that those changes have not yet finished) which are altering
the dominant logic for the discipline. The title is an assertion that the
reader will need evidence for, of course, and that evidence must be his-
torically grounded in the sense that the claim is one of a change from a
previous logic to an emerging new one. The paper will inevitably have to
describe both the old logic, the emerging one, and the narrative of how
the former is giving way to the latter. Vargo and Lusch therefore need to
first write the history of marketing so far in order to describe the ‘old’
logic and then they can bring in their description of the new logic.
However, as much research on the use of rhetorical history by organisa-
tions demonstrates, the careful rhetorical shaping of the narrative of the
past can be the key to the successful acceptance of a new or emerging
vision. As Suddaby et al. (2010) put it, “history is a social and rhetorical
construction that can be shaped and manipulated to motivate, persuade,
and frame action, both within and outside an organization” (p. 147).
Importantly, if an organisation is trying to galvanise stakeholders around
a “vision of the future”, that vision must be embedded “in a coherent and
collectively held narrative of the past” (Suddaby et al., 2021, p. 3). The
organisation needs to ensure that the version of history that they are
embedding their future in is resonant and appropriate for their stake-
holders. Given that Vargo and Lusch are very much presenting a vision
that they want the stakeholders of the JoM to buy-in to, we would there-
fore expect them to construct a historical narrative that will unify their
readers and secure their adherence to their telling of the new emerging
logic. A paper that seeks to assert that marketing is evolving to a new
dominant logic is bound to risk initiating anxiety and confusion in aca-
demics who have previously not thought of their discipline in such terms.
In order to be as acceptable as possible by the readership of the journal,
80 C. Miles
Vargo and Lusch’s vision of where marketing is heading needs to ground

itself, then, in a vision of marketing’s past which serves to allay fears and
promote cohesion. Smith et al. (2018, p. 8) argue that “the persuasive
power of any rhetorical history […] lies on the ability of managers in
selecting historical frames and developing historical narratives that echo
historical metanarrative structures and widely held assumptions and proj-
ect a feeling of certainty and security about the future”. Let us explore,
then, how this galvanising, unifying history might be presented to “proj-
ect a feeling of certainty and security” about the future of marketing.
In the Beginning…
The creation of a historical narrative begins with the very first sentence of
the paper. We are told that the foundations of the “formal study of mar-
keting” are in economics and were concerned with the “distribution and
exchange of commodities and manufactured products” (V&L, 2004,
p. 1). This is not presented as a contentious statement or one which might
have an alternative, or might be in need of nuance—it provides the foun-
dational ‘fact’ from which Vargo and Lusch can then build everything
else. The assertion that the discipline of marketing is born from econom-
ics also provides a strong amplification of its ethos—for, as the authors
tell us, economics was the “first social science to reach the quantitative
sophistication of the natural sciences” (op. cit., p. 3). The formal study of
marketing must also, then, share in that “quantitative sophistication”.
This is a rallying start for a paper that addresses an audience of marketing
scholars, of course—being told that one’s discipline sprang from such a
rational and scientific womb flatters the audience and helps to generate
an initial positive reception. It is also the ‘mainstream’ approach to the
origins of marketing scholarship—the one that is usually reproduced in
surveys of the discipline (see Sheth et al. 1988; Hunt & Goolsby, 1988;
Wilkie & Moore, 2003; Shaw & Jones, 2005). It is notable however, that
the majority of these historical surveys of the discipline do not spend the
rhetorical energy that Vargo and Lusch do on amplifying the scientific
status of the economic thought from which marketing emerged. Indeed,
those surveys do often problematize or complicate the simple view that
the earliest marketing scholars were representative economists. So, for

example, Hunt and Goodsby (1988) describe Arch Shaw as a business-
man first (“founder of the Shaw-Walker Company, a manufacturer of
office equipment”, p. 36) and as an economist last. They characterise his
foundational 1912 article, “Some Problems in Market Distribution”, as
written because “he despaired that his fellow economists focused all their
attention on manufacturing and production” (ibid.) and ignored the
equally important matter of distribution. Shaw’s desire to focus on the
‘middleman’ (as distribution agents were called) is thus a result of identi-
fying where economics was weakest in its description of contemporary
business practice and trying to provide thought leadership to fill this
void. This perspective also underlines the lack of synchronisation between
marketing thought and marketing practice. Many strategies and tactics of
modern marketing thought have existed in marketing practice long
before they are described by academics. As Hollander et al. (2005) have
noted, “most marketing historians imitate the practice in economics of
separating the history of practice from the history of thought as in the
distinction between economic history and the history of economic
thought” (p. 32), and yet it is “business people [who] create most of the
innovations in marketing practice”. This means that when discourses
construct narrative of ‘the birth of marketing’ or the evolution of market-
ing they need to initially make it clear whether they are referring to mar-
keting thought or marketing practice. This is what Vargo and Lusch
(2004) do right from their first line in referring to the “the formal study
of marketing” and the efforts of “marketing scholars” (p. 1). However, the
table that V&L produce in order to summarise the evolution of market-
ing is entitled “Schools of Thought and Their Influence on Marketing
Theory and Practice” (p. 3). This would seem to tell a different story to
that advanced by Hollander et al. (2005), a story in which marketing
thought influences marketing practice. The title therefore establishes a
claim for the precedence of marketing thought and its power in influenc-
ing marketing practice, which is afforded a subordinate position.
I will not be overly concerned here with the details of Vargo and Lusch’s
depiction of the history of marketing thought. The majority of historical
studies of the development of marketing make it clear that there is a great
deal of nuance involved in delineating the many influences that have
82 C. Miles
contributed to the discipline and professional practice—and the ways

that practice and scholarship have influenced each other. Tadajewski
(2022), for example, has argued persuasively for appreciating the “diverse
paradigmatic lenses available at the cusp of the 20th century” and how
marketing “history reflects a much broader, more diverse confluence of
theoretical resources than has been appreciated to date” (p. 2). As a con-
sequence, and as a counter to economics being “elevated to the forefront
as the major constitutive force in driving marketing theory”, Tadajewski
argues for pluralising “the systems of thought that have shaped our disci-
pline, fragmenting the largely ‘unitary’ account of marketing’s genealogi-
cal development” (ibid.). Vargo and Lusch, however, are not engaged in
historical research into the roots of marketing—the purpose of the open-
ing section of V&L (2004) is to establish a rhetorical history that aids in
the persuasive presentation of their vision of the state to which marketing
is evolving. In other words, the purpose of talking about marketing’s past
here is to aid in the construction of an appealing trajectory—a trajectory
that resonates with the interests and values of the audience.
I will note here quickly that in Chap. 4 I will suggest what might
broadly be called an ideological motivation for the presentation of the
periods of marketing thought in four distinct phases, related to a particu-
lar theory of systems evolution presented in a precursor paper co-authored
by Lusch (Kiel et al., 1992). The possible reasons for the almost complete
submergence of this motivation in V&L (2004) are also discussed in that
chapter. In the current chapter, I will be restricting myself to discussing
the more overt persuasive implications of Vargo and Lusch’s use of rhe-
torical history.
The path that Vargo and Lusch sketch out runs from the birth of mar-
keting thought from classical economics, that quickly coalesces into the
functional school of marketing, that in turn ‘morphs’ into the marketing
management approach from the 1950s onward, finally leading to the
(then) current period, “1980-2000 and Forward” (p. 3), where “separate
lines of thought” (p. 1) and “disparate literature streams” emerge that are
largely independent of the microeconomics framework that informed
marketing management. While marketing historians would no doubt
baulk at the elision of detail and nuance (as well as the use of such terms
as “morph” to describe the emergence of marketing management from
the functional school) anyone would be hard pressed to convincingly

summarise the course of marketing thought in roughly two pages of a
journal article. Such a summary will always have to be ‘big picture’ and
will inevitably focus on those aspects that speak most strongly to the
meaning that the authors wish to establish. In V&L (2004), that mean-
ing is the phased progress of marketing thought. Marketing emerges from
the scientific, “quantitative sophistication” of classical economics, grows
towards describing and explaining the specific functions involved in the
production and provision of value, then “morphs” into the managed,
analytical pursuit of optimal customer satisfaction, and then branches
out into a number of seemingly disparate perspectives. This is a depiction
of organic growth: a searching, evolving movement that while able to be
demarcated into clear phases nevertheless demonstrates a unitary energy.
Along this rhizomatic path, there is little indication of the how much
contention has beset marketing thought—the art versus science debate,
the quantitative versus qualitative tension, the shock of the Ford &
Carnegie reports, longstanding disagreements around the scope of mar-
keting, and the ‘mainstream’ versus ‘critical’ perspectives. Instead, mar-
keting is portrayed as a largely monolithic project that moves itself
through a constant, evolving process. Until we get to the final era, begin-
ning in the 1980s, when “many scholars believed that marketing thought
was becoming more fragmented”, while others “called for a paradigm
shift” (V&L, 2004, p. 1), with some arguing for the complete abandon-
ment of exchange theory. “Are these calls for alarm?”, Vargo and Lusch
ask. And in a classic example of rogatio, they then provide the answer—
“perhaps marketing thought is not so much fragmented as it is evolving
toward a new dominant logic”. This is the point at which all of Vargo and
Lusch’s rhetorical history is aimed. The organic, progressive growth of
marketing thought flounders in its final phase in an almost cancerous
overgrowth of disparate perspectives and theories; its unity appears frag-
mented and threatened and the alarm is raised. Yet, Vargo and Lusch still
their audience’s consternation by shifting the frame, offering the prospect
that what we see as fragmentation is in fact something else—the signs of
a new, emerging dominant logic.
84 C. Miles
Stasis and Frames
Vargo and Lusch offer the prospect to their readership of making the
alarming fragmentation of marketing thought since the 1980s simply
disappear. All that is required is to follow their interpretation of this frag-
mentation as the signs of a single evolving paradigm, an integrating,
“more comprehensive, and inclusive dominant logic” (V&L, 2004, p. 2).
The core rhetorical device being used here is re-definition and it is impor-
tant to spend a short while considering its place in rhetorical argumenta-
tion. The issue of definition is usually dealt with in the area of rhetoric
known as stasis (or status) theory. As Marsh (2006, p. 42) explains, “when
the rhetorical act involves a debate and a judgment by an audience, stasis
theory helps identify the core issue—the key point of disagreement (sta-
sis) upon which judgment must be rendered”. The establishment of the
stasis (the position) at the start of an argument allows a speaker to indi-
cate clearly for the audience exactly what is the issue being argued about.
Then, once established, “an orator can move deeper into the invention
phase, seeking and refining the ideas that develop his or her side of the
issue” (ibid.). More abstractly, Dieter (1994) describes it as the momen-
tary standing still that must occur between the changing of opposites, or
contrary motions. In judicial rhetoric, where stasis theory has had the
most influence, it describes the initial setting out of the conflict of pleas
or the “crucial question at issue” (Longaker & Walker, 2011, p. 76), and
involves the establishment of fact, definition, quality, and jurisdiction
(Marsh, 2006). The stasis of definition is concerned with what exactly we
should properly call something—so, should the events that occurred on
a particular date be called death by misadventure, manslaughter, or mur-
der, for example. Related to the stasis of definition is the stasis of quality,
where the rhetor establishes the criteria for judging whether something is
good or bad, preferable or to be avoided, and how it might stand in a
hierarchy of value held by the audience. As Longaker and Walker (2011)
note, “argumentation can shift from one stasis to another in complex
discourse” (p. 80). Vargo and Lusch do just that, shifting both how we
define the era of fragmentation and the way that we evaluate it. In their
presentation of the fourth era of marketing history, Vargo and Lusch
address both the stasis of definition and the stasis of quality—arguing

that what the mainstream has judged to be a weakness should instead be
seen as a strength once the nature of events in that fourth era has been
redefined. Importantly, the stasis of fact is not in dispute—the disparate
discourse streams and variety of perspectives that emerge from the 1980s
onward are still just the same—but instead of seeing them as evidence of
a dangerous, enfeebling fragmentation Vargo and Lusch urge us to accept
them as proof of a positive, strengthening shift in paradigm.
However, Vargo and Lusch’s redefinition of Era IV is not just a matter
of the initial setting out of grounds for their argumentation. Yes, rhetori-
cally, we can see it as an important instance of stasis, but there is a further
aspect to the strategic play here that should not be missed—namely, its
therapeutic power. And to understand this we need to examine the con-
text (indeed, the framing) of framing.
The persuasive consideration of the combination of stases of definition
and quality has a modern instantiation in the concept of framing. Indeed,
it is useful to remember that the original concept of frames was born in
the work of the doyen of rhetorical analysis, Kenneth Burke. In his
Attitudes Toward History (originally published in 1937), Burke describes
how “our philosophers, poets, and scientists” use words (“the code of
names”) to “interpret reality” and “shape our relations with our fellows”
(Burke, 1984, p. 4). The names that those who seek to influence us choose
to use in the descriptions of their realities, “prepare us for some functions
and against others, for or against the persons representing these func-
tions”, and even “suggest how you shall be for or against” them (ibid.).
These “codes of names” solidify into “frames of acceptance”, which are
the “more or less organized system of meanings by which a thinking man
gauges the historical situation and adopts a role and relation to it” (p. 5).
Influential ‘codes of names’, or frames, define our reality and the ways in
which we relate to other humans and groupings of humans; they form
our meanings and so our orientations (see Blankenship et al., 1974 for
the relationship of this last term to frames in Burke’s work). Burke’s con-
ception of “acceptance frames” (p. 92) has strong similarities to Gregory
Bateson’s theory of “psychological frames” as set out in his essay, ‘A Theory
of Play and Fantasy’ (Bateson, 2000, from a conference paper delivered in
1954). The two thinkers shared what Fleckenstein (2017) has
86 C. Miles
characterised as a “thirty-year dialogue on the skew in which others, but

rarely themselves, link their thinking” (p. 23) and there is no direct cita-
tion of Burke’s earlier formulation in Bateson’s explanation of his concept
of “psychological frames” (Bateson, 2000, p. 186), that instead uses refer-
ents from mathematical set theory, gestalt psychology (particularly the
distinction between figure and ground), and the metaphor of the picture
frame. Psychological frames provide “premises” for the “sort of thinking”
that is appropriate in a particular communication situation—how par-
ticular words and constructions should be interpreted, what topics and
interpretations are to be included and excluded from consideration, and
how messages should be evaluated. Bateson’s principal focus was on the
psychological implications of communication involving the paradoxical
presentation of contradictory frames (a frame of play and a frame of con-
flict, for example) and we can see how this developed into his larger the-
ory of the communicative origins of schizophrenia. The originating point
of reference for framing that is more usually given in the traditions of
management, sociology, organisation studies, and communication stud-
ies is Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974). Goffman notes that
Bateson’s explication of the “psychological frame” is his starting point and
he shares, he says, the same conception that frames provide “definitions
of a situation” (1974, p. 10) or “schemata of interpretation” (p. 21).
It is from Goffman’s work that researchers studying organisational
change generally begin their conceptualisation and it is this disciplinary
focus that it is of most use to us when thinking about framing as persua-
sive strategy in Vargo and Lusch’s presentation of S-D logic, as opposed
to the traditions of frame analysis in media studies or political communi-
cation. Cornelissen and Werner (2014, p. 181) argue that, “there are few
constructs that are as ubiquitous across traditions of management and
organizational research, and indeed the social sciences more generally, as
that of frame or framing”. They elsewhere identify it as one of three
metatheories that “together organize empirical observations and explana-
tions” in studies of organisational identity (Haslam, et al., 2017, p. 319).
Importantly, however, the organisational change literature has gradually
moved away from Goffman’s “processual approach to framing” (Werner
and Cornelissen 2014, p. 1453) and has instead adopted a conceptualisa-
tion of framing as “a strategic process of persuasion aimed at gaining
support and legitimacy for political and institutional change” (p. 1452).
So, for example, Logemann et al. (2019) define framing in the context of
organisational change as involving the “systematic use of a set of key-
words, catchphrases, metaphors, and idioms to provide an interpretive
frame of reference for a change” and note that it “invokes meaning in line
with existing cultural registers of understanding and is meant to make
things familiar and to mobilize support and gain legitimacy for a change”
(pp. 2–3).
We can see how this aligns generally with both Burke and Bateson’s
approaches, but we can also see how it meshes with the role of definition
in rhetorical stasis. The adoption of particular words, with particular met-
aphorical referents and cultural resonances, helps to set out the terms of
argument in a way that will promote a new approach to the issue, and
lead to the adoption of a change in perception. V&L (2004) redefine
Fragmentation as heretofore unseen Unity: A unity that takes the form of
“evolving to a new dominant logic” (p. 1). We have, in other words,
named the phenomenon incorrectly because we have misperceived what
it really is. In Goffmanian terms, we have applied the incorrect frame in
order to decipher “what is going on here” (Goffman 1974, p. 46). If we
consider Vargo and Lusch as change agents in the diffuse scholarly organ-
isation that is ‘marketing theory’ we can see them seeking to persuade
readers to re-frame the chaotic fragmentation of Era IV as a unifying
logic by trying to persuade us that the disparate literature and research
streams that have flourished since the 1980s have been misframed. They
employ their own “set of keywords, catchphrases, metaphors, and idioms
to provide an interpretive frame of reference for a change” (Werner &
Cornelissen, 2014, p. 1453). However, perhaps even more than as agents
of organisational change, the more enlightening way of seeing Vargo and
Lusch and the strategy that they are pursuing in regards to Era IV is as
instigators of a form of therapeutic intervention. The therapeutic tool of
reframing, while being rooted in the work of Goffman and Bateson, stems
from the work of Paul Watzlawick (1967, 1993), a psychotherapist and
communication theorist. Watzlawickian re-framing is used in pursuing
second-order change (Watzlawick et al. 2011), or meta-change, which
attempts to step outside the existing terms of the system, or the problem
situation presented in the therapeutic encounter. As Watzlawick et al.
88 C. Miles
(2011) put it, “to reframe, then, means to change the conceptual and/or
emotional setting or viewpoint in relation to which a situation is experi-
enced and to place it in another frame which fits the ‘facts’ of the same
concrete situation equally well or even better, and thereby change its
entire meaning” (p. 93). Vargo and Lusch are reframing the way that the
scholarly community had been interpreting the contemporary cacoph-
ony of voices. They are advancing a therapeutic gambit to reduce the
professional and existential anxiety arising from “marketing’s tumultuous
paradigm wars” (Bradshaw and Brown, 2008, p. 1401) during “the era of
turbulent transition” (Sheth et al., 1988, p. 3). The reframing seeks to
change both the conceptual and emotional viewpoints of its readers—
providing hope and a sense of unity where there was anxiety and partisan
aggression. In this sense, Vargo and Lusch’s rhetorical history functions as
an Ericksonian tale-telling (Miles, 2015) utilising resources from the ‘cli-
ent’ (i.e. the mainstream four era marketing history framework) in order
to construct a therapeutic narrative for constructive change. I will return
to this interpretation of S-D logic in later chapters, particularly when
considering the place of transcendence in both systems theory and the
use that S-D logic makes of systems theory.
It is instructive to remember that both rhetorical stasis and therapeutic
reframing are process oriented strategies. In other words, one does not
simply say, ‘don’t think of things like that, think of them instead like this’,
in order to achieve a reframing. Instead, the reframing is achieved in a
persuasive manner through the construction of what Ericksonian thera-
pists call a ‘teaching tale’, a narrative that makes the advantage and natu-
ralness of the reframing clear and attractive to the client. And a definition,
or redefinition, is one of the stases that provides the starting points of an
argument. Consequently, the way that Vargo and Lusch construct this
argument, or persuasive narrative, is the next object of our attention.
However, first we must consider two other aspects of the presentation of
the rhetorical history of marketing in V&L (2004): its use of repetition
and the significance of kairos, or what the Romans called decorum.
Structural Repetition
As Farnsworth (2011) notes, “repetition is one of the most important

general ideas in rhetoric” (p. 3). There are many rhetorical figures that use
repetition to attract attention, provide emphasis, and increase the memo-
rability of a series of words or phrases. So, alliteration describes the repeti-
tion of the initial letter of a series of words, anaphora is the repetition of
the initial words of successive clauses or sentences (with epistrophe being
the same thing but repeating the final word), and polysyndeton being the
repetitive use of conjunctions. Rhetoric also considers the unpatterned
repetition of words under the term ploce (or ploke, or ploche, depending
on your transliteration tradition). As Fahenstock (2011) explains, ploce
“epitomizes arguments based on the same form of a word appearing again
and again in an argument” and is characterised by the “intermittent or
unpatterned reappearance of a word, within or across several sentences”
(p. 133). Perhaps one of the most obvious instances of repetition in the
first half of V&L (2004) is the three times repetition of the four eras
framework: once in prose, once as a table, and once as a figure (that one
has to re-orientate either oneself or one’s journal/device to read effec-
tively). This is an interesting compounding of visual and verbal rhetorical
resources. The table and figure serve to enshrine the reframing discussed
above in two different formats in addition to the arguments presented in
the body of the article itself. Tables and figures usually play the role of
illustration or evidence in academic writing—we often use them to pres-
ent data or summarise research literature context. They break the textual
mode and introduce visual elements that, through commonplace associa-
tions and connotations, can do strong persuasive work. A good example
is the large arrow-like block that features in Figure 1 (p. 4), and which
contains a small paragraph that speaks of “thought leaders” continually
moving from a focus on operand resources and towards conceptions of
marketing operations centred around operant resources. This arrow figu-
ration, which points to the right (with its traditional Western ortho-
graphic associations of moving into the future) literally frames the
paragraph in movement, lending it a concerted dynamic connotation
that helps to strengthen the ‘rightness’ and inevitability of this march
90 C. Miles
towards progress. Combined with the implied, but vague, x and y axes in
the figure, the arrow moves our attention towards the future while at the
same time we are led down towards the deeper truths of the new emerging
paradigm. What we might perhaps first feel is a paradoxical tension
between emergence and depth (the visual placement of the new paradigm
at the bottom right of the figure clashing with the verbal identification of
it as ‘emerging’) has already been resolved by Vargo and Lusch’s initial
description of the new paradigm as a “richer foundation for the develop-
ment of marketing thought and practice” (p. 2) and their portrayal of it
as something which is beneath the apparent fragmentation. The rhetorical
power of such seemingly slight visual elements is something that is well
known to practitioners of persuasive design. Greenwood et al.’s (2019)
study of the visual rhetoric of annual reports argues convincingly that
“the impression of an icon as neutral or denotative may in fact imbue it
with greater connotative power” (p. 807), explicitly citing arrows as one
such class of icon. However, we can also step back from the arrow and
recognise that even just the use of a table and figure can have such con-
notative power. As Greenwood et al. (2019) note, such graphic framings
of information are “often fallaciously assumed to be signs with high
indexicality” (ibid.) and therefore carry with them connotations of exact-
ness, truth, and credibility of source. In V&L (2004), the repetition of
the same basic information that is carried in the main body of the text
across both a table and a figure increases the power of such connotations
by combining it with the device of ploce.
In V&L (2004), we might reasonably ask why exactly the same histori-
cal movement of marketing thought is presented in both a table and fig-
ure? What is missing from the one that could only be supplied in the
format of the other? The table (Table 1 Schools of Thought and Their
Influence on Marketing Theory and Practice), for example, could have
had a third column added in the middle or at the right which emphasised
the movement from a goods-centred model of exchange to the service-
centred model of exchange, which is the only element that Figure 1 really
provides more clarity with in contrast to the table. Yes, the table might
have had to have been printed in landscape orientation, but that should
not have been a problem given the journal’s willingness to have Figure 1
printed in that way. The presence of both a table and a figure presenting
the idea that marketing has been moving both from a goods focus to a
service focus and most recently from a time of disparate paradigms
towards a unity of voice serves to provide a heightened impression of
evidence backing up the same argument in the body of the article. It is,
in other words, classic rhetorical ploce, leveraging the textual idiosyncra-
sies of its genre to persuasive effect.
Kairos and the Epideictic
The discussion of the agonistic moment of V&L (2004) that I opened

this chapter with can also be extended to a consideration of the place of
kairos in Vargo and Lusch’s delineation of their version of the four eras of
marketing thought. Kairos refers to “an opportune moment to rhetori-
cally seize the advantage” (Blake Scott, 2006, p. 116). Fahnestock (2011)
notes that the concept “covers both marking appropriate times and inter-
vening at optimal moments” (p. 330) and Kinneavy and Eskin (2000)
suggest that it “may be understood as situational context, a more modern
term” (p. 433). In this sense, Vargo and Lusch’s description of the frag-
mentation of marketing thought that initially characterises Era IV
reminds the reader of the situational context of their paper, recalling to
their attention the existential alarm and uncertainty that the discipline
faces. This helps to construct a sense of the opportune moment for the
authors’ presentation of what they claim is a new emerging logic that will
unify rather than tear the discipline asunder. They evoke the moment of
anxiety and unease in order to transform it (reframe it, as we have seen)
into a moment of hope. This, interestingly, offers us the potential to see
Vargo and Lusch as creators of an epideictic mode and also allows us to
highlight a specific version of kairos, the kairos of “poetic timing that
produces connections” (Sullivan, 1992, p. 319). As Untersteiner (1954)
puts it, the poet can produce a particular kairos, “an instant in which the
intimate connection between things is realized” (p. 111). This is precisely
the ritualised drama that Vargo and Lusch are involved in constructing
here—a revealing of the realisation of the intimate connection between
things that their audience would never have considered connected.
Sullivan (1993) demonstrates how the epideictic speaker is often
92 C. Miles
perceived as a seer, someone able to perceive a truth that the audience, in

their attention to the humdrum details of daily life, are unable to see
until it is brought to their vision by the orator, who uses their “ability to
put voice to an interpretation of reality” (p. 122). Some of Sullivan’s fur-
ther description of the nature of the epideictic rhetor also sounds famil-
iar. He notes, for example, the way in which an epideictic delivery will
generate authority through an “allusions to historical events or works and
thereby identify themselves with the tradition, but they are not likely to
ground their assertion in tremendous detail” (p. 123)—we can certainly
recognise this in the way that V&L (2004) uses rhetorical history.
Furthermore, Sullivan notes that the final characteristic of epideictic
rhetoric is its focus on consubstantiality—bringing the audience and the
speaker together through a sense of shared values, strengthening a sense
of community through the interpretation of reality that they offer. It will
be useful to bear this epideictic aspect of Vargo and Lusch’s presentation
in mind as we examine the principal components of their argument in
support of the service-dominant logic.
The Place of Paradigm

So, now let us return to consider the ways in which Vargo and Lusch
construct the persuasive argument for the redefinition/reframing of the
turbulent times of Era IV. One of the central elements in this argument
is Vargo and Lusch’s use of the concepts of paradigm and paradigm shift.
So, they describe each of the first three eras of marketing thought (classi-
cal/neo-classical economic thought about distribution, the functional
school, and then the marketing management school) but then when they
introduce the fourth era, the era of fragmentation, Vargo and Lusch first
introduce the paradigm concept, asserting that in the 1980s, “many new
frames of reference that were not based on the 4 P’s and were largely
independent of the standard microeconomic paradigm began to emerge”
(V&L, 2004, p. 1). They then begin to quote a number of supporting
passages from authors who themselves make strong use of the “paradigm”
term. So, they note Webster’s (1992, p. 1) call for the “microeconomic
maximization paradigm” of marketing management to be critically
re-examined, they reference Achrol and Kotler’s (1999, p. 162) statement

that “a paradigm shift for marketing may not be very far over the hori-
zon”, and they then heap on top of that Sheth and Parvatiyar’s (2000,
p. 140) suggestion that “an alternative paradigm for marketing is needed”.
This establishes a particular lexical frame of reference for the readers of
V&L (2004)—it reminds them of a term that they would have come
across with increasing frequency over the twenty years prior to the publi-
cation of the foundational paper, a term with various useful connotations
that the authors can then rhetorically leverage to make the argument for
S-D logic more powerful. Having other, trusted voices to support the use
of the term is a well-considered strategy, though, because it is a term that
is not without its problems and does need to be handled carefully. Let us
examine in more detail the significance of its connotations and the role it
plays in Vargo and Lusch’s persuasive argumentation.
The term “paradigm” came into usage through its adoption by Thomas
Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn uses
the word to refer to the way that “some accepted examples of actual sci-
entific practice—examples which include law, theory, application, and
instrumentation together—provide models from which spring particular
coherent traditions of scientific research” (p. 10), such as Newtonian
mechanics or Copernican astronomy. Scientific training involves the
learning of the currently accepted paradigms of “normal science”, so that
those researchers whose work is “based on shared paradigms are commit-
ted to the same rules and standards for scientific practice” (p. 11). Kuhn’s
argument is that “the successive transition from one paradigm to another
via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature science”
(p. 12). These were the scientific revolutions, or “paradigm shifts” (p. 66),
that his book recounted. Revolutions were generally preceded by periods
of “pronounced professional insecurity” (p. 67–8) as those engaged in
‘normal science’ increasingly recognise that their shared assumptions are
unable to account for new observations. Vargo and Lusch’s use of the
term at the start of V&L (2004), then, references this understanding that
scientific thought moves on through revolutionary shifts of paradigm and
that when one is due it is heralded by professional fragmentation and
insecurity. This works rhetorically as an overture preparing the reader for
the communication of the terms of a new paradigm, raising expectations,
94 C. Miles
but doing so within a conceptual framework, Kuhn’s paradigms, that

reminds them of the inevitability and naturalness of shifts in the models
we hold of how our science works. Of course, the use of Kuhn’s terminol-
ogy also flatters marketing scholars for whom the status of their discipline
as a science is a principal element in their own personal ethos as research-
ers. Importantly, Vargo and Lusch can reply upon these connotations of
Kuhnian paradigms confidently because of the way that paradigm talk
had itself become so paradigmatic in business and management studies. As
Hunt (1993) notes, Kuhn’s “book continues to be highly influential in
the social sciences” (p. 79). In addition, Burrell & Morgan’s (1992) work,
Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis, which embeds
Kuhnian paradigms within the realm of organisation and management,
has ensured that most marketing scholars will treat the Kuhnian lexicon
and argumentation as familiar and established. Both management and
marketing have had their own versions of the “paradigm wars” (Shepherd
& Challenger, 2013; Tadajewski, 2008) and although appetite for debates
around the incommensurability of paradigms has somewhat lessened, the
root concepts of paradigm and paradigm shift remain part of the main-
stream marketing scholarship lexicon. Both on the publication of V&L
(2004) and today, marketing scholars will generally nod their heads in
recognition and understanding when the words are used. They have, in
other words, become commonplaces of the marketing lexicon. From a
rhetorical perspective, this means that use of the terms helps to establish
ethos for the authors and a sense of shared value with the readers of V&L
(2004). Beyond this, though, the very concept of paradigmatic progres-
sion, as one way of thinking in a discipline shifts to another, is a powerful
idea to invoke early in the paper as it sets the terms for the way that Vargo
and Lusch will argue for the growth of the new service-dominant
paradigm.
It is important to note that not all marketing scholars have been happy
to integrate the Kuhnian model of scientific progress into their thinking.
In the discipline of marketing there has been no one more outspoken
against the usefulness of the “dominant paradigm” concept than Shelby
Hunt. Hunt has continually noted that, “all the major positions in The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions were thoroughly discredited by the mid-
dle of the 1970s” (Hunt, 1993, p. 79), and calls it in, Hunt & Morgan
(1997, p. 76), “one of the most thoroughly discredited epistemologies of

the 20th century”. For Hunt, the concept of “dominant paradigms” is
unsupportable—and he quotes Lauden’s (1977, p. 151) conclusion that
“Kuhn can point to no major science in which paradigm monopoly has
been the rule, nor in which foundational debate has been absent”. Hunt
also notes that Kuhn himself retreated from “his ‘Gestalt shift’ views on
paradigm change and incommensurability because he recognised that
such views implied relativism” and in his later works “finds no use for
either ‘paradigm’ or ‘incommensurability’ let alone ‘paradigm incom-
mensurability’” (Hunt, 1991, p. 41). Indeed, Tadajewski has taken up
this baton somewhat arguing that the “lack of engagement with Kuhn’s
more recent work across the management disciplines” (Tadajewski, 2008,
p. 275) means few scholars have an understanding of “how Kuhn gradu-
ally became aware of the awkward nature of his incommensurability
argument”. In other words, the understanding of the paradigm concept
that is prevalent in marketing scholarship is one very much retarded in an
early formulation, one that its author so significantly revised that its later
instantiations do away with the basic lexicon that marketing and man-
agement scholars have largely retained from it. However, in the case of
V&L (2004) there are a few further elements which muddy the waters.
The first is that Vargo and Lusch do not explicitly cite either Kuhn’s or
Burrell & Morgan’s works. They use the lexicon of paradigms only in so
far as it has become part of the larger commonplace lexicon of marketing
scholarship—but this lack of citation serves to distance them and their
arguments from the problematic detail of just how empirically grounded
the tradition of paradigmatic competition is. The second element is the
issue of what influence Hunt’s view of Kuhnian paradigms had over their
use by Vargo and Lusch in the foundational article—given that Hunt
himself is thanked in the acknowledgements of the article as a reader of an
earlier draft? At the same time, in his invited commentary published
alongside V&L (2004), Hunt does not mention Vargo and Lusch’s use of
the paradigm concept at all in his commentary—instead preferring to use
the word ‘logic’ (Day et al., 2004)—the term that Vargo and Lusch them-
selves subtly substitute for ‘paradigm’ as they move into the substance of
their argument for the emerging dominance of the service perspective (as
I will show below). Hunt does not usually use the word ‘logic’ in this
96 C. Miles
way—this is important because he has probably used the word ‘logic’ in

his own published output more than any other marketing scholar.
Normally, when Hunt refers to logic he means formal or mathematical
logic, and most often uses it in discussing the place of logical positivism
and logical empiricism in marketing theory. The accurate definition of
these terms is important in Hunt’s work and it is telling that he appar-
ently adopts, without comment, in Day et al. (2004) the rather vague and
inaccurate use of ‘logic’ that Vargo and Lusch put the word to.
I think that there are two principal reasons for Hunt’s silence on the
matter of Vargo and Lusch’s inclusion of the ‘paradigm’ concept. The first
is that he understands they use it only as a rhetorical strategy to generate a
recognition of a shared lexicon with their readers—they do not cite Kuhn,
they do not invoke the spectre of paradigm incommensurability, they do
not use it with any form of committed intent beyond its commonplace
lexicon function as a synonym for weak definitions of general perspective
or worldview. Secondly, Hunt can see clearly that the emerging dominant
logic that Vargo and Lusch are describing is an inclusive one rather than a
supplanting one—the service logic contains the goods logic rather than
destroys it. It is a meta-move, a stepping back and drawing a larger frame
rather than an entirely new conceptual grounding that is incompatible
with the old, mainstream perspective. So, when V&L (2004) conclude
that the “emerging service-centered dominant logic of marketing … has
the potential to replace the traditional goods-centered paradigm” (p. 15)
they make it very clear that what is changing is the “focus”. In the penul-
timate paragraph of the paper they underline this very clearly with their
phrasing—“the focus is shifting”, “the orientation has shifted”, “the aca-
demic focus is shifting”, and “science has moved from a focus on mechan-
ics to one on dynamics” (V&L, 2004, p. 15). The most profound change
that the paper’s conclusion leaves us with is a shift in what is considered “a
more appropriate unit of exchange”—from the “static and discrete tangi-
ble good” towards “the application of competences, or specialized human
knowledge and skills, for and to the benefit of the receiver” (ibid.).
However, it is not as if tangible goods are disappearing, it is just that a
service logic shifts its focus away from them as units of exchange and
instead chooses to focus on the application of competences as the units of
exchange. Tangible goods are folded into the service perspective in a way
that is completed different to early Kuhnian paradigm shifts that produce

an incompatibility between ways of doing ‘normal science’ in the world,
and also very different to Burrell and Morgan’s (1992) incommensurable
organisational paradigms. So, even though the very last sentence of V&L
(2004) speaks of the emerging logic having the “potential to replace the
traditional goods-centered paradigm” (ibid.) the way that Vargo and Lusch
have explained the relationship between the goods and service logics com-
pletely undercuts the impression that they might be using the Kuhnian
paradigm concept with any rigour.
It is useful to return here to our previous discussion of the agonistic
moment of V&L (2004). There is a form of subtle tension in the relation-
ship between Hunt’s excoriating campaign against Kuhnian relativism
and Vargo and Lusch’s early use of the paradigm concept. The substance
of the exchanges between Hunt as a draft reader of the foundational
paper and Vargo and Lusch is, of course, not available to us—but his
presence as both an acknowledged reader within the piece and then as one
of the invited commentators alongside it means that his intellectual pres-
ence, and the complete rejection of Kuhnian terms that he has argued for
across so many publications, works to problematize and challenge V&L’s
(2004) adoption of the lexicon. Hunt’s silence might indicate that he sees
no serious issue in the way that the foundational article uses that lexicon
(namely, it does not use it in earnest), and we might see his complete
sidestepping of the term in his own commentary as recognition that the
authors’ promulgation of the term ‘logic’ is a good opportunity to avoid
the connotations of relativism and incommensurability that have deserv-
edly dogged Kuhnian terms. We might also consider a line in Hunt’s
invited commentary that implies the existence of some stern direction
from the editor to avoid focusing on points of conceptual contention that
might be considered to be already well-rehearsed—“this commentary
does not nitpick their argument but, at the editor’s suggestion, amplifies
and extends it, using the resource-advantage theory on which V&L draw”
(Day et al., 2004, p. 22). Hunt’s silence can be considered a form of rec-
ognition that Vargo and Lusch have been sufficiently influenced by his
trouncing of the Kuhnian thesis that their rhetorical, strategic use of the
‘paradigm’ concept makes of it only something that would come under
the heading of ‘nitpicking’ if mentioned. The oscillation between the
98 C. Miles
‘logic’ and ‘paradigm’ terms that we find in V&L (2004) is an agonistic

contest between the force of Hunt’s arguments and the pressure of mar-
keting (and management) scholarship’s idiomatic lexicon. Indeed, we
might use S-D logic as an indication of some form of soft win for Hunt’s
case in the sense that V&L (2004) introduces a transition towards the
term ‘logic’ that continues throughout Vargo and Lusch’s later work.
While there continue to be some exorbitant examples of marketing schol-
ars drowning in the rivers of Kuhn’s early formulations (Achrol & Kotler,
2011, being a typical example, and one notes naturally Roland Rust’s
invited contribution alongside the foundational paper which takes the
paradigm concept and absolutely runs with it, Day et al., 2004), the tre-
mendous success of S-D logic has at least meant that the lexicon of para-
digm shifts has been at least partially supplanted by talk of ‘logics’ and
‘frameworks’.
Which is a good point from which to begin a consideration of the
subtle stratagem that Vargo and Lusch adopt in their substitution of
‘logic’ for ‘paradigm’.
The Shift to Logic

The concept of ‘logic’ is clearly important for the argument that Vargo
and Lusch advance in V&L (2004). However, as already intimated, their
use of the term does not reference the lexicon of Hunt-approved logical
positivism and logical empiricism, nor the even more rarefied world of
formal and mathematical logic. Quite where the idea of a “dominant
logic” comes from is, in terms of the citation trail that is provided in the
paper itself, rather difficult to say. Outside of its use in the title and the
abstract, the first occurrence of the term ‘dominant logic’ is in an early
sentence that describes “the emergence of services marketing as a subdis-
cipline, following scholars’ challenges to ‘break free’ (Shostack 1977)
from product marketing and recognize the inadequacies of the dominant
logic for dealing with services marketing’s subject matter (Dixon 1990)”
(V&L, 2004, p. 1). Either of the two citations here might, then, be the
source for the ‘dominant logic’ phrasing, though we would note that it is
not surrounded by quotations marks in the text and this might cause us
to be less sure. Indeed, neither Shostack (1977) nor Dixon (1990) use the
phrase at all; though, the former does delineate between what he terms
‘Intangible-dominant’ and ‘Tangible-dominant’ market entities (as well
as constructing a fascinating molecular model for services marketing that
trades heavily on the visual rhetorical power of scientific metaphors). The
next time that Vargo and Lusch use the phrase it is clearly in their own
voice, as they ponder whether “marketing thought is not so much frag-
mented as it is evolving toward a new dominant logic” (V&L, 2004,
p. 1). The term is not overtly explained, but used in a manner that mir-
rors the text’s use of the Kuhnian paradigm lexicon, namely, that it trusts
that the reader already understands these terms and they therefore need
no formal citation or definition.
Where, then, might such confidence in a common understanding (and
acceptance) of this term in their readership come from? The most likely
source relates to the work of C. K. Prahalad, who is cited a number of
times in V&L (2004) for his research on co-creation and core competen-
cies. Prahalad & Bettis (1986) introduce the idea of “dominant general
management logic”, often shortened to “dominant logic”, which they
define as “the way in which managers conceptualize the business and
make critical resource allocation decisions—be it in technologies, prod-
uct development, distribution, advertising, or in human resource man-
agement” and which “can more broadly be considered as both a knowledge
structure and a set of elicited management processes” (p. 490). They go
on to explain that the dominant logic “is a mind set or a world view or
conceptualization of the business and the administrative tools to accom-
plish goals and make decisions in that business” and that it is “stored as a
shared cognitive map (or set of schemas) among the dominant coalition”
(p. 491). Interestingly, they identify paradigms (defined in reference to
Kuhn’s work on scientific paradigms) as one of the four ways in which
dominant logics evolve—“the dominant paradigm and the dominant
logic are conceptually similar but employed in different fields” (p. 492).
Prahalad and Bettis’ (1986) article was the first recipient of Strategic
Management Journal’s best paper prize and in a follow up article almost
ten years after they discuss the evolution that their ‘dominant logic’ con-
cept has undergone. In this later exploration of the concept, they describe
the dominant logic as an “information filter” (Bettis & Prahalad, 1995,
100 C. Miles
p. 7) which focuses organisational attention. A firm’s dominant logic is

therefore a “fundamental aspect of organizational intelligence” (ibid.)
that “puts constraints on the ability of the organization to learn” (p. 8).
Bettis and Prahalad (1995) develop an elaborate medical analogy to
describe the way in which the dominant logic “permeates an organiza-
tion, yet it is invisible”, predisposing it to “certain kinds of strategic prob-
lems and often interacts with organizational systems and structures in a
complex way causing these problems” (pp. 8–9). This, they note, is simi-
lar to the way in which a human might have genetic predispositions
towards certain types of diseases. An organisation’s dominant logic, then,
is similar to a human’s genetic profile—it makes us what we are but also
determines what we can be particularly vulnerable to. Evolving from this
medical analogy, Bettis and Prahalad (1995) then introduce a broader
systems theory framing for their concept, identifying the dominant logic
as “an emergent property of complex adaptive organizations” (p. 10) that
does not surrender its nature to reductionist attempts to pull it apart.
This move towards an explicit systems theory framing is significant in the
light of Vargo and Lusch’s own increasing later adaptation of S-D logic
towards systems theory concepts and I will deal with the rhetorical impli-
cations of this in Chap. 6. At this stage, however, it serves to note that the
systems approach allows Bettis and Prahalad to explore the significance of
the dominant logic for an organisation’s ability to deal with changes in
the environment. They note that the dominant logic “provides a set of
heuristics that simplify and speed decision making” as an organisation
seeks to adapt to its environment and anticipate it. It provides a “local
optimum that represents an equilibrium solution” (p. 11). However,
what can be a boon can also be a curse for the organisation and if the
environment changes too quickly or too grossly, then a dominant logic
that was a local optimum becomes a liability. It is at this point that Bettis
and Prahalad halt all the metaphors and identify a way in which biologi-
cal and organisational evolution are quite different. In nature, the length
of time that an organism has been in equilibrium does not have an effect
on its ability to adapt to environmental change—whereas in organisa-
tions it most certainly does. As they note, “the longer a dominant logic
has been in place, the more difficult it is likely to be to unlearn” (p. 11).
They then suggest that it might be the case that the further an
organisation is from equilibrium the easier it will find unlearning its

dominant logic—crisis, in other words, can initiate the replacement or
revision of a dominant logic.
There are a number of points that can be made regarding Bettis and
Prahalad’s work on organisational dominant logic in relation to V&L
(2004). Firstly, it should be noted that the concept of Kuhnian paradigms
is entirely absent from Bettis and Prahalad (1995)—it has been dropped
in favour of the medical and systems theory analogies. This perhaps mir-
rors the ambiguity with which Kuhnian paradigms are handled by Vargo
and Lusch and their similar use as a way in to new ideas for an audience
that might initially be more familiar with the received Kuhnian wisdom.
Their use by both sets of authors therefore stems from a strategy of bor-
rowing ethos to facilitate a more appropriate framing later (a strategic
piggy-backing, as it were). Paradigms remain a point of common under-
standing for the management/marketing scholar audience and therefore
can facilitate a persuasive sense of shared lexicon and terms of reference.
Secondly, the evolutionary systems approach that is present in Bettis and
Prahalad’s explication of organisational dominant logic is echoed in the
focus on evolutionary movement in V&L (2004). Kuhn’s (1962) The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions does not discuss the evolution of scien-
tific thought apart from in minor terms when referring to how rules grad-
ually accrete within a paradigm. Instead, Kuhn’s early work argues that
science moves on by revolutionary paradigm shifts. But neither Bettis and
Prahalad nor Vargo and Lusch are interested in spooking their audience
with talk of revolution. For both sets of authors, evolution is the meta-
phor of movement that they choose to emphasise. Evolution has both
scientific and natural, organic connotations. It also carries with it a sense
of inevitability—‘things evolve, they have to, it’s normal’. For those in the
readership of V&L (2004) who are cognisant of the work of Prahalad and
Bettis (as well as Prahalad and Ramaswamy), the evolutionary framing of
the emerging service-centred dominant logic of marketing (V&L, 2004,
p. 15) reassuringly echoes the chosen framings used in earlier discussion
of organisational dominant logic. Which inevitably leads us on to the
third point—the reasons for the absence of any clear citation of Prahalad
and Bettis’ work as a foundation for Vargo and Lusch’s adoption of the
dominant logic terminology. Prahalad, as already noted, does get cited in
102 C. Miles
V&L (2004), but only in terms of his work on resource-advantage theory

and co-creation with Conner, Hamel, and Ramaswamy. It is strange that
a seam of research that would appear to so fundamentally influence the
basic lexical framing of Vargo and Lusch’s argument is not specifically
cited. Now, we have already come across this situation in regards to the
absence of reference to Kuhn, but the absence of reference to Prahalad
and Bettis (1986) or Bettis and Prahalad (1995) is perhaps more curious.
Vargo and Lusch’s audience would be expected to be familiar with the
lexicon of Kuhnian paradigms (which had seeped across the social sci-
ences quite effectively by 2004), but could they equally be expected to be
familiar with the lexicon of Prahaladian strategy? And, indeed, given that
Bettis and Prahalad’s (1995) work would provide Vargo and Lusch with
useful arguments to explicitly reference when setting up their idea of an
emerging, evolving dominant logic it surely would make sense to cite it
even if they were confident that it might already be a taken-for-granted
concept by their readership. Of course, one might always point out that
a paper that is trying to do so much and has to pack so much in is doomed
to have to leave some things only lightly pencilled in, and the journey
through peer review inevitably involves the swapping out of some refer-
ences for others more favoured by reviewers. In the end, though, the
document we have available to us does not provide any context for the
phrase, “dominant logic”—it is used as if it needs no introduction and no
explanation. This can be a strategy to shut down questioning, in that if
one acts as if everyone should be familiar with a term then that can make
readers unfamiliar with it feel somehow deficient and therefore they
might elect to hide that perceived deficiency through silence. I am not so
sure that this is the intent here, though (and the strategy rarely survives
peer review in academic discourse). Rather, I think that Vargo and Lusch
might want to avoid Prahalad’s name from overbalancing their presenta-
tion and conceding the strength of the influence—not just in terms of
the whole framing of “dominant logic” but also the central premise of
co-creation and, indeed, the focus on products as vehicles of experiential
value. A common feature of many oppositional readings of S-D logic is
the accusation that Vargo and Lusch have re-hashed earlier, already estab-
lished, research traditions—in other words, that there is not much that is
original in their presentation beyond a certain formal combination of
lexical and conceptual elements. Perhaps the lack of any reference to the
origins of the concept of a “dominant logic” might be an attempt to
head-off knee-jerk reactions to an over-reliance on Prahalad’s oeuvre in
V&L’s (2004) conceptual framework.
Prahalad’s presence in the invited commentaries alongside V&L
(2004), with a short piece entitled “The Cocreation of Value” is both
indicative of his stature as a “distinguished scholar” in the estimation of
the editor, Ruth Bolton, but also his importance in the development of
the idea of the co-creation of value, an idea which plays such a central
place in the foundational premises presented in V&L (2004). Prahalad’s
piece (Day et al., 2004) begins by saying that he has been specifically
asked to “comment on V&L’s sixth foundational premise: The customer
is always a coproducer” (p. 23). While making no explicit reference to his
part in the introduction of the concept of ‘dominant logic’ he does use
the phrase a number of times and very much within the terms of his own
work—so he talks about how, once we begin to “challenge the deeply
held assumptions about marketing staples” about brand meaning, the
role of exchange and the nature of innovation, we will find that “new and
exciting opportunities unfold” (Day et al., 2004, p. 23). In other words,
the existing dominant logic is acting like a set of blinders to our vision
(Prahalad, 2004) preventing us from seeing crucial changes in the mar-
keting environment to which we need to adapt. Once we challenge the
core assumptions of that logic we can move beyond its (failing) equilib-
rium position and discover new perspectives that will allow us to engage
more effectively with emerging forces and relationships. An important
aspect of Prahalad’s position is that he is not offering a new dominant
logic—rather he seeks to point out the dampening effect of dominant
logics on adaptive strategic thinking in a dynamic business environment.
Vargo and Lusch, therefore, can be seen as discursively constructing a
rhetorical hybrid of early Kuhnian paradigm theory and the Prahalad and
Bettis conception of organisational dominant logic. This allows them to
present a ‘new’ dominant logic that consumes and inverts the old way of
thinking. They are not ‘true’ to either of the source conceptualizations
but take the elements that will resonate most effectively with their audi-
ence and their overall strategy. Their hybridization is made less scholarly
questionable (in the sense that it invites less detailed scholarly
104 C. Miles
examination) precisely because they have erased the formal links to the
source concepts. They have filed the serial numbers off the constituent
parts, is it were. As a result, it is the rhetorical power of the terms that
dominate V&L (2004) rather than an ‘authentic’ embedding of the con-
cepts in ways that are consistent with the legacies of their source dis-
courses. The audience is being trusted to resonate with these terms in
general ways rather than stop and nitpick about exact definitions and
contexts.
Logic, Metonymy, and Sympathetic Magic

A further point that must be noted regarding the use of the word “logic”
is its rhetorical power to connote the epitome of scientific rationality—a
connotation that then works to backlight the whole article in a cool,
rational glow. This is something that Vargo and Lusch import from its use
in the work of Prahalad and Bettis, of course, and it speaks to the persua-
sive attractiveness of the scientific patina of ‘logic’ that the authors of S-D
logic adopt/adapt it for their own use. That they are conscious of the
connotative web the term can be used to spin is made clear in their exten-
sion of it to the “premises” (and, later, “axioms”) of their presented logic.
It is worth noting that in their own foundational article, Prahalad and
Bettis (1986) also use enumerated ‘premises’, but Vargo and Lusch really
go to town in the use of initialisms and subscripts. Using the orthography
of symbolic logic and mathematics increases that cool, rational glow sub-
stantially. There is no empirical reason for the use of subscript, after all, it
is a visual rhetorical device designed to recruit the audience’s linking of
sub- and super-script with the hard sciences and mathematics.
Interestingly, a similar rhetorical use of mathematical orthography can be
found in Bettis and Prahalad (1995) where the authors provide a math-
ematical expression for the function of organisational unlearning—the
presentation of which provides no additional information beyond that
already given in the text, but does provide the persuasive patina of scien-
tific validity. It should also be noted that another core precursor paper for
V&L (2004), namely Kiel et al.’s (1992) article “Towards a New Paradigm
for Marketing”, contains a large amount of this sort of rhetorical use of
mathematical language and orthography (with one of Kiel’s alia being

Robert Lusch, importantly). I will return to the question of rhetorical
precursors (and discuss the latter paper in a lot more depth) in Chap. 4.
Digging a little more carefully into the rhetorical processes that are
being recruited here, we can connect the use of “logic”, “premises”, and
mathematical orthography with a broad metonymic impulse to invoke
the connotations of rationality and scientific rigour through the use of an
isolated characteristic of those things—language conventions and orthog-
raphy. When we see mathematical typography our minds immediately
confer upon the discourse the respect and trust that we have been taught
are due the empirical sciences. It is an ethos strategy—borrowing the
credibility generally afforded the traditions of mathematically grounded
endeavour—but one implemented through the metonymic replacement
of container for the contained. The metonymic impulse is one common
across many elements of rhetorical style and delivery. Even something as
seemingly commonplace as wearing a good-looking suit when giving a
presentation has its origins in the idea that if you look impressive (by
adopting some of the outward signs of leadership and success), then the
audience will take you for someone who is indeed a successful leader and
will trust your words accordingly. We are often given advice when under-
taking persuasive gambits to ‘look the part’ or ‘fake it ‘til you make it’.
Indeed, the power behind such strategies is precisely what informs so
much of Aristotle’s regret when he introduces the subject of style in his
treatise On Rhetoric, noting that it is necessary (rather than just) for the
rhetor to consider style because it relies on the “baseness of the audience”
(Aristotle, 1991, p. 217) whose mind “is tricked as though the speaker
were telling the truth” (p. 229).
It is necessary to say a few words here about the relationship between
metonymy and synecdoche (briefly covered in Chap. 2). Both of these
devices have been listed under the heading of ‘tropes’, or constructions
that rely in some manner upon a change in the meaning of a word, since
the Rhetoric ad Herennium of the first century BCE. Since Ramus’ six-
teenth century consolidation of the categories of rhetoric, the tropes have
generally been restricted to four: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and
irony (Fahnestock, 2011). Metonymy is usually defined as a figure of
substitution, just like synecdoche. The difference lies in what exactly they
106 C. Miles
substitute. So, metonymy is described by Lanham (1991) as having four

types: “substitution of cause for effect or effect for cause, proper name for
one of its qualities or vice versa” (p. 102). Fahnestock (2011) defines the
terms more broadly as covering “substitutions with terms chosen accord-
ing to some recoverable, specifiable principle of association” (p. 102).
Synecdoche, however, relies upon the substitution of “part for whole,
genus for species, or vice versa” (Lanham, 1991, p. 148). In their influen-
tial study, Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (2003) describe
synecdoche as a “special case of metonymy” (p. 36), a sub-categorisation
that rhetorical studies scholarship has not been keen to embrace, though
Lanham (1991) does somewhat muddy the waters noting (separately)
that both metonymy and synecdoche are characterised by manipulation
or change of scale. Indeed, Burke (1969), while considering metonymy
and synecdoche separately does speak of the way that the former “over-
laps upon” (p. 507) the latter. However, he then goes on to propose that
“metonymy may be treated as a special application of synecdoche”
(p. 509) and in illustrating the traditional grounds covered by synecdo-
che uses a number of examples (such as “container for the contained” and
“cause for effect”) which are often recruited as examples of metonymy
(vide Fahnestock’s, 2011, inclusion of both of these in her list of met-
onymic categories). Burke’s argument that metonymy can be thought of
as operating with reduction while synecdoche concerns representation is
alluring but can lead us to some equally problematic identifications. In
the end, for our purposes in the analysis of Vargo and Lusch’s work, the
identification of metonymy or synecdoche here is less important than the
exploration of how the adoption of the trappings of ‘logic’ works persua-
sively. One important point that does arise from the quagmire of compet-
ing definitions is the distinction between tropes based on a ‘part for
whole’ substitution and those utilising a ‘container for contained’
exchange, particularly when examining matters of language or lexicon.
When Vargo and Lusch (or Prahalad and Bettis, for that matter) adopt
certain terms from the vocabulary associated with logic or mathematical
argument, are they employing a ‘part for whole’ or a ‘container for con-
tained’ substitution? One might argue that the use of a few terms redo-
lent of mathematico-logical endeavour constitutes an instance of ‘part for
whole’ substitution—a very small part of that endeavour is being used to
stand in for the whole grand edifice of ultra-rational reasoning. On the

other hand, one might take the position that a discipline (or philosophy,
or epistemology, or ontology, etc.) is not constituted by its terminol-
ogy—rather it is contained by it, its lexicon acting as a vessel (and vehi-
cle). Accordingly, we can adopt aspects of the lexicon of a discipline while
not actually implementing the procedures, basic assumptions, or prac-
tices of that discipline. One can use the word ‘logic’ without being logical;
one can use words like ‘experiment’, ‘sample’, ‘hypothesis’, ‘inference’
and ‘analysis’ (what McCloskey, 1985, calls “scientisms”, p. 122) without
actually being scientific. The difference between these two positions rests
upon whether one sees the language that a concept is habitually expressed
in as an integral part of that concept or as ‘simply’ a vehicle for explaining
that concept. Of course, sometimes, a rhetorical gambit might depend
for its persuasive power on the confusion between the two positions,
between ‘part for whole’ and ‘container for contained’.
There is also another form of confusion at work here in the rhetorical
power of both metonymic and synecdochal substitutions. The use of
words from lexical domains that hold considerable ethos (and therefore
considerable power) in contemporary scholarship can also be said to
work by recruiting magical thinking in the audience, specifically sympa-
thetic magical thinking, which “in Western cultures operates predomi-
nantly subconsciously” (Subbotsky, 2010, p. 14). Rozin and Nemeroff
(2002) note that the “laws of sympathetic magic do not necessarily invoke
a sense of human or animate agency as a device to account for events in
the world” (p. 201). Instead, sympathetic magic relies upon two basic
principles: similarity and contagion. The law of contagion means that
‘once in contact, always in contact’, whereas the law of similarity states
that like causes like. One can see immediately the connection to met-
onymic and synecdochal figuration. Contagion magic operates by using
something that has at one point been associated with, or part of, someone
or something and therefore contains some of its ‘essence’ (so, burning a
person’s fingernail pairings in order to afflict them with heartburn, for
example). Use of the law of similarity relies upon superficial resemblance
or appearance and so it is often exemplified by the classic ‘voodoo doll’,
which resembles the person who is the target of the magical attack. Now,
while it is not very common for most of us to come across overt and
108 C. Miles
deliberate instances of sympathetic magic in our daily lives, researchers

have long pointed out that many of the decisions that we make are influ-
enced by thinking that displays an understanding of the world that is
more in tune with sympathetic magic than the accepted scientific
approaches to cause and effect (Rozin et al., 1989; Rozin et al., 1992;
Vamos, 2010; Fernandez & Lastovicka, 2011). So, bringing this back
home to marketing scholarship (and indeed the realm of the marketing
practitioner), we can transfer some of the ‘essence’ of mathematical logic
and scientific rigour to our own discourse and arguments via the inclu-
sion of terminology from those lexical fields. The audience, in recognis-
ing where such terms come from, subconsciously attributes that essence
to the containing discourse. S-D logic’s use of terms such as ‘logic’,
‘premise’, and ‘axiom’ magically spread the patina of science over its
enterprise. And this, like all such strategies, is helped by the audience’s
willingness to believe—as we have seen above, the mythic roots of the
discipline in economics (as well as the legacy of the scathing Ford and
Carnegie reports on US Business schools of the 1950s) has meant that
marketing demonstrates an unusual enthusiasm for obsessing over its sta-
tus as, or yearnings to be, a science (vide Converse, 1945; Bartels, 1951;
Hutchinson, 1952; Buzzell, 1963; Hunt, 1976, 1990, 1993; Anderson,
1994; Brown, 1996; Tadajewski, 2006; Tapp & Hughes, 2008; Brown,
2009; Ritson, 2018; Miles, 2018). Of course, this sort of sympathetic
magic (or metonymic lexical strategy) is not restricted to Vargo and
Lusch’s S-D logic. I have argued elsewhere (Miles, 2010, 2014, 2016,
2018) that much of the fascination with metaphors, metonyms and ter-
minologies drawn from the hard sciences and medicine that is prevalent
in marketing scholarship and marketing practice derives from a larger
attraction to the rhetoric of control (over consumers, over processes, over
the fate of businesses and brands). I have also argued (Miles, 2013, 2018)
that this attraction to the rhetoric of control means that magic and sci-
ence are treated in very similar ways in marketing discourse. Vargo and
Lusch’s (2004) integration of lexical elements from the empirical sciences
into the core structure of their presentation of the new ‘logic’ rhetorically
serves to promise a level of abstract certainty, of controlled universality
that is tremendously attractive to both marketing scholars and
practitioners.
The whole presentation of S-D logic as a ‘logic’, then, works as a form

of sympathetic magic convincing us that the ‘foundational premises’ can
provide marketing with the sort of basic certainties that the discipline
and profession often appear to be lacking. There is no real difference
between this and the tried-and-tested advertising strategy of dressing an
actor up in a laboratory coat to get us to buy toothpaste. The patina of
the empirical and mathematical disciplines will always bring ethos to a
claim. Though marketers might commonly use the tricks of ‘deference to
authority’ (Cialdini, 2000) in their own persuasive communication and
be very aware of how they work on other people, this does not afford
them an instant immunity when they are exposed to them in their own
professional and disciplinary work. The tools of ethos amplification are
long-standing and many, precisely because we are so susceptible to them.
Logos & Rhetorical Argumentation

Having now discussed the rhetorical use of terms such as ‘logic’ and
‘premise’ in V&L (2004), it would seem an apposite moment to examine
the actual logic, or logos of the paper—in other words, its argumentation.
Of course, though the Western philosophical tradition since Aristotle has
tended to see ‘proper’ argument as something dominated by the consid-
erations of formal logic (Tindale, 2004), most of the argumentation that
we as humans indulge in everyday, in all manner of situations, is rhetori-
cal argumentation, far away from the clinical purity of such staples as the
syllogism. In order to assess the foundational paper’s logos, in this section
I will attempt to summarise the structure of the reasoning presented in
V&L (2004). Once that structure is clear I will ask what makes it persua-
sive, or, even more broadly, what does this structure achieve?
Argument Sequence
Claim 1:
The evolution of marketing can be thought of in 4 stages (founda-
tional, functional, marketing management, fragmentation).
110 C. Miles
Support: Contextual citations.

Claim 2:
The fragmentation of the fourth stage has lead scholars to call for a
paradigm shift in order to rescue marketing from its chaotic, mori-
bund state.
Support: Contextual citations—then summarised as ‘calls for alarm’
(an interesting ambiguous construction—should it not be ‘are these calls
cause for alarm’?).
Claim 3:
The fourth stage, fragmentation, has been misunderstood—instead of
fragmentation it actually signifies an emerging unity of thought, a unity
to be found in a service-orientation rather than a goods-orientation.
Support: Marketing thought has been increasingly shifting away from
a central concern with “the exchange of tangible goods” and “towards the
exchange of intangibles”. The apparently fragmented thought of the
fourth era can be shown to share service-oriented assumptions. Proof is
provided by contextual citations supporting the idea of a service-dominant
view of marketing.
Further support: Table 1 and Figure 1, which re-state claims 1–3 from
pages 1–2 and provide further contextual citations.
Claim 4:
The emerging unity of thought discernible in the apparent fragmenta-
tion of the fourth stage of marketing is a ‘fundamental shift in worldview’
or ‘dominant logic’.
“Support: A review of how the conception of ‘resources’ has changed
since the time of Malthus” introduces Constantin and Lusch’s (1994)
distinction between operant and operand resources. Economists from the
1950s began to note that operant resources were becoming the most
important resources for firms to master.
Example: The microprocessor—though starting with silica, it is “pure
idea”—the silica is “embedded with knowledge”.
Further support for Claims 3 and 4: We are reminded that marketing
inherited the goods-dominant perspective from economics. Resource
Advantage theory and Core Competence theory are presented as theories
supporting the service-dominant perspective.
Further elaboration on the elements of service-dominant perspective

leads to the presentation of the Six Attributes (in Table 2, with no sup-
porting citations) and the Eight Foundational Premises.
Claim 5:
There are 8 foundational premises that characterise the emerging
service-dominant logic.
Support: Each FP is then presented and explained, using supporting
citations. The arguments that accompany each FP are still heavily histori-
cal in nature.
The Discussion section deals with a number of implications of the S-D
perspective for marketing practice, marketing education, and marketing
scholarship. It promotes changes in the basic marketing lexicon, in the
way marketing communicates with consumers and in the ways that mar-
keting is taught. In terms of argumentation, the whole section is based on
an ‘if-then’ structure; ‘if these are the foundational premises of the
emerging logic, then we will need to change the following assumptions
and practices accordingly’.
The Conclusion reiterates the claims of the historical evolution of mar-
keting towards the service perspective while giving the goods-dominant
view kudos for its part in driving the early intellectual growth of the dis-
cipline. The times have changed and we need a more appropriate perspec-
tive to move forward.
Citations, Authority, and Originality
Citations in V&L (2004) can be divided into two main types; those that
provide historical evidence of marketing thought that supports claims
regarding the stages of its evolution (let us call these historical citations)
and those that provide evidence of marketing scholars supporting the
authors’ vision of an emerging service-dominant perspective (contempo-
rary citations). The former citations evidence ‘the way that we were’, while
the latter are used to prove ‘the way that we are becoming’. Having said
this, there is ample mixing of the two citation types throughout the paper
and although there is, as one would expect, a preponderance of historical
citations in the first third of the paper, they are still used in the
112 C. Miles
presentation of the FPs and the Discussion section. This is because V&L
rehearse micro-instances of the dynamic of evolution at many points
throughout the paper, not just in the first few pages. So, for example, in
the explication of FP3, Goods Are Distribution Mechanisms for Service
Provision, V&L go back to Norris’ (1941) book on consumer demand to
identify one of the earliest scholars to explicitly argue that “people want
goods because they provide services” (V&L, 2004, p. 10). They then
include a reference to the third edition of Kotler’s (1977) Marketing
Management textbook for another more historical point of support next
to the more contemporary scholars they cite from the 1990s. This pattern
is typical across the paper and helps to generate the strong sense of his-
torical grounding for V&L’s presentation that I have already dis-
cussed above.
It is noticeable that each of the FPs (as well as Claims 1 and 2 above)
are ‘proven’ by demonstrating that, as concepts, they have already been
stated and argued for by previous authors. Only Claims 3, 4, and 5 are
‘new’ to Vargo and Lusch—and even they are ‘proven’ through appeal to
citations that demonstrate that other scholars have previously demon-
strated the truth of the core elements that those claims are constructed
from. This has meant that one of the principle objections to V&L (2004)
has always been that it is not presenting anything original (see Brown,
2007, for a summary of such criticisms of the original paper). From the
centrality of the value proposition in modern marketing practice to the
vision of customers as co-producers, and from the understanding of
knowledge as the source of competitive advantage to the assertion of all
economies as service economies, all of the concepts that are reified in the
Foundational Premises pre-exist Vargo and Lusch (2004). As Williams
(2012) notes, “the article is essentially an integrative literature review” in
which the authors are “describing trends in marketing thought that have
been influential and well accepted in certain circles, but have not yet
reached total mainstream acceptance” (p. 472). However, while this reli-
ance on existing work makes the supporting substance of V&L (2004)
something that can be not unfairly described as “the intellectual equiva-
lent of retro-autos like the neo-Beetle, the Mini nouveau and ye olde
P.T. Cruiser” (Brown, 2007, p. 292), we should not be blind to the sig-
nificant persuasive power carried in the explicit presentation of Claims 3,
4, and 5. Brown (2007) argues that the message that marketing instead of
being in moribund fragmentation is on the brink of a new unifying logic
is attractive because it embodies the “essentially apocalyptic idea that a
qualitatively different dispensation is imminent” and that this trope “goes
back a very long way and, in its formal manifestations, is frequently asso-
ciated with the writings of a thirteenth-century clerical clairvoyant,
Abbot Joachim de Fiore” (p. 292.). While there is a lot to recommend in
this comparison to the salvatory persuasions of Christian eschatology, the
one point that I think is worth picking up is the description of de Fiore
as a ‘clairvoyant’ because it is Vargo and Lusch’s quality of vision that is
the key to the originality of their claims.
Claims 3, 4 and 5 produce their rhetorical power through the exhorta-
tion to the audience to shift their perspective; ‘this is not fragmentation,
this is actually a unified voice’, ‘there is a new logic emerging and these
are the 8 premises that it rests upon’, ‘many have written of these things
separately, but no one has seen how they lock together to characterise this
emerging logic’. It is, therefore, the claim to a vision beyond the simple
recounting of their sources that marks Vargo and Lusch’s logos. As we
have already seen, Claim 3 is first made at the bottom of the very first
page of the article: “Perhaps marketing thought is not so much frag-
mented as it is evolving toward a new dominant logic” (V&L, 2004,
p. 1). Its wording is softened somewhat by the modal ‘perhaps’, and there
is a distinct personification of ‘marketing thought’—though, of course,
the teleological framing of evolving ‘towards’ some particular state indi-
cates the abuses that metaphors using scientific concepts can so often be
subjected to. However, the core message is an invitation to see behind the
apparent reality of contemporary marketing, to look beyond. While it is
tempting to pick up on the prophetic, eschatological tone that is in evi-
dence here (and that I will revisit in Chap. 4 in my analysis of Kier et al.’s.
1992 precursor paper), there is another point of reference here that is
rather more close to home. The implication of V&L’s initial contextuali-
sation for and delivery of Claim 3 is that others have not been able to see
what they have—marketing has fallen into a state of alarm and confusion
because until now no one has been able to see properly. We have all been
myopic—only seeing the apparent truth of what is right in front of us
rather being able to step back and see the larger pattern behind. As I am
114 C. Miles
sure the reader can tell by now, the point of reference that I am talking
about is Levitt’s (1960) ‘Marketing Myopia’ piece for the Harvard
Business Review. This is one of the most read articles in marketing and
has been reprinted, anthologised, and referenced so much that it is fair to
call it an institution of the discipline. It has also conditioned marketers
with a familiar, impactful metaphor that warns of the consequences of
not looking carefully at the bigger picture, of being too wrapped up in
one’s own immediate operations and standard assumptions and practices
that one cannot see the reality of how the world (and your market) is
changing. Now, Levitt’s paper holds such a fond place in the hearts of
marketers because its warning is directed at CEOs and CFOs who ignore,
at their peril, the counsel of customer-oriented marketers. But its influ-
ence means that the trope of a voice warning of myopic misinterpretation
is one that will strongly resonate with Vargo and Lusch’s audience. And
the fact that Levitt’s piece is an early rallying call against the goods-
dominant paradigm (and is cited as such in V&L, 2004) simply serves to
strengthen the echoes of its principle metaphor, of the failings of near-
sightedness, in Vargo and Lusch’s Claim 3 which is, after all, a claim that
marketing scholars could be suffering from myopia with respect to their
perception of the fourth stage of marketing history.
Claim 3 as Value Proposition
FP7, as presented in V&L (2004), asserts that “the enterprise can only
make value propositions”, and these propositions need to “strive to be
better or more compelling than those of competitors” (p. 11). I would
argue that Claim 3 is the value proposition of V&L (2004). It is compel-
ling because it offers the attractive prospect of a unified marketing theory
that gathers together service scholars, relationship marketers, Resource-
Advantage theorists, core competence strategists, consumer culture
explorers, and marketing network analysts. It allows us to re-set market-
ing scholarship in a way that makes sense of the fragmentation character-
ising marketing scholarship in the fourth stage of its evolution, and it
offers to do this without throwing anything away or rejecting anything
other than a goods-dominant logic that very few remaining scholars were
keen on thinking of as the centre of the discipline anyway. The value of

S-D logic, naturally, is co-created with the audience of V&L (2004). It
becomes a paper with such a gargantuan citation record because others
have recognised how they can create value with it. In order to generate
that recognition, Vargo and Lusch present their vision of how the dispa-
rate literature streams of later marketing thought can be brought together
into a “coherent framework” (Williams, 2012, p. 472). The FPs serve as
the “S-D logic manifesto” communicating “the core ideas as succinctly
and coherently as possible”(Williams, 2012, p. 481). Bu the FPs do not,
per se, constitute a value proposition. Instead, it is Claim 3 which serves
this function. Not only is it embodied in the explicit proposition that
“perhaps marketing thought is not so much fragmented as it is evolving
toward a new dominant logic” (V&L, 2004, p. 1), but it is implied
through the tabular and figural instantiations of the 4 stages of marketing
thought, as well as in the rhetoric of evolution and paradigm that frames
the paper (and I have already discussed above). It is also implied through
the tabular presentation of the “six attributes” of the emerging service
approach, which advances a neat, complete one-to-one mapping of dif-
ferences between the goods-dominant and service-dominant views.
Within the terms of V&L (2004), the value of the authors’ perspective
must be co-produced (or co-created) with their consumers. The market-
ing power of the value proposition lies in its effective presentation of the
prospect of value—something that will sufficiently galvanise consumers
(by being “more compelling” than its scholarly competitors) for them to
commit to using the perspective and finding value in that use. Of course,
in the context of marketing scholarship, ‘use’ does not have to signify
complete adoption of, or even agreement with, the perspective. Critics of
S-D logic have found scholarly utility in publishing their negative apprais-
als of the perspective. Furthermore, as we can see in a significant number
of the commentaries published alongside V&L (2004) in the Journal of
Marketing, and then in the expanded, edited collection of reactions and
ripostes in Lusch and Vargo (2006), the service-dominant perspective
provides many authors with the significant utility of an opportunity to
remind readers of their own (obviously more effective, more insightful)
work that subsumes the S-D logic.
116 C. Miles
The proposition that what we have previously seen as fragmentation is

in fact the sign of unity has a large and varied potential utility value for
scholars. In countering it, a scholar may advance their own cause; in
adopting it, a scholar may ally themselves with a salvatory movement that
seeks to embrace a large number of existing marketing research streams;
in comparing it with one’s own chosen frameworks, a scholar may further
promote those frameworks and hope to revivify interest in them. Claim
3 acts as a powerful value proposition that does indeed do what a value
proposition should do—offer a compelling prospect of utility value to
the audience. Stepping back a little from the frame of the paper and re-
engaging with the larger framing of Bolton’s editorial choices for the
addition of the commentaries to accompany the publication of V&L
(2004), it is worthwhile considering just how compelling the presence of
those reactions by famous marketing scholars are as illustrations of that
utility value. Bolton provides us with clear support for the value of Claim
3—if the claim for an emerging, unifying logic was not a valuable one to
the discipline why else would the editor of the discipline’s premier jour-
nal be rousing the dragons of its knowledge-hoard? The commentaries act
as a series of ‘celebrity’ examples of how scholars can extract utility value
from the service-dominant perspective. The efficacy of this approach in
empowering the central value proposition contained in Claim 3 is dem-
onstrated by Lusch and Vargo’s (2006) own later enthusiastic adoption of
it. It is instructive, too, to consider Bolton’s strategic decisions as clear
examples of the co-production of value. The editor of the Journal of
Marketing is a stakeholder for the authors of the articles that are submit-
ted for their consideration. Indeed, adapting (once again) Stern’s (1994)
revised communication model for advertising, we can understand the
editor as an initial consumer of the submitting authors’ message—some-
one who, like the ‘sponsorial consumer’ in Stern’s framework, is the gate-
keeper that any message needs to first satisfy before wider dissemination
out to ‘actual consumers’. In true, service-dominant fashion, we also see
how this sponsorial consumer co-produces the final message, using
choices around framing and contextualising to highlight and illustrate
the value-in-use of the message, a co-production strategy which itself
inevitably produces value for the journal in terms of greater readership
and citations for the issue.
This description of Claim 3 as the value proposition of V&L (2004)

and the way that the various stakeholders co-create presentations of use-
value and value itself broadly echo the rhetorical analysis of the editorial
and commentary provided towards the start of this chapter. This is
because the concepts of value proposition and co-creation of value are
fundamentally rhetorical (in the sense that they are concepts that imple-
ment a rhetorical approach to human relationships). Value propositions
are persuasive strategies—they are “compelling” offers of the value that
a stakeholder can potentially create through the use of a service. As a
concept, co-creation emerges from an understanding that the audience
creates meaning, that we must look to the audience’s interpretation of our
message for the final meaning of that message. This is ‘rhetorical’ in that
it sees the audience as an operant resource. Since rhetoric’s early days, the
relationship between speaker and audience has been considered in highly
nuanced terms. The rhetor was urged to consider the existing knowledge,
basic assumptions, background, age, and other characteristics of what we
would nowadays would call the demographics and psychographics of the
audience in the construction and delivery of their address. In addition,
the principle of kairos (later re-formulated as decorum in the Roman
adaptation of rhetoric), often translated as “proper timing” (Cahn, 1989,
p. 129) but perhaps more usefully understood as an appreciation of “situ-
ational context” (Kinneavy & Eskin, 2000, p. 432), has played an impor-
tant part in the Western rhetorical tradition’s approach to the improvisatory
co-creation of the persuasive moment. Being able to react to the indi-
vidual exigencies of the moment, the mood of the audience, their looks
of disbelief or enthusiasm, their heckles and objections, to incorporate
their mediated environment by adapting important news of the
moment—attention to all of these possibilities and more means that a
rhetor is sensitive to the changing nature of the audience and uses them
as operant resources to co-create their persuasive message. Vargo and
Lusch (2004) and the value proposition that is at its heart are compelling
examples of a careful attention to kairos, and also serve to balance the
agonistic framing of the article discussed earlier in this chapter. Claim 3,
and the supporting context for it provided by Vargo and Lusch in the
opening of the paper, are a kairotic response to the agonism of the final
fourth stage of marketing thought (an agonism, remember, that is also
118 C. Miles
dramatised in the review process of the paper and the commentaries that
surrounded it on publication). The claim that the agonism of competing
and fragmented streams of thought can be transformed into a unified
common voice emerging from that struggle displays the virtue (arete) of
Vargo and Lusch’s perspective. It functions persuasively because it is
anchored in a kairotic recognition that the audience needs this vision of
unity, they are waiting for it. The fact that the supporting evidence for
Claim 3 is provided by reference to established theories, the works of
disparate authors working in disparate genres and sub-genres of market-
ing thought, exemplifies the co-creative nature of responsive rhetoric—to
persuade the audience of the unity of thought in the emerging logic, they
must construct a picture of that logic made from pre-existing work, work
that is familiar to the audience, carries the well-known names of credible
authorities, and that already benefits from the approval and assent of
large numbers of those readers. This is not a weakness of the S-D logic
perspective as delivered in V&L (2004)—it is its strength. The point of
originality in the paper resides in Claim 3 and nowhere else. Everything
else is rhetorical argumentation designed to make that claim persuasive.
The relationship between agon and kairos in V&L (2004) is most
strongly played out in the tension between the salvatory appeal of Claim
3 and the many voices in the framing commentary who attempt to posi-
tion it in relation to their own work. Each commentator struggles (in an
agonistic sense) to display the virtue of their own perspective through
their interpretation of Vargo and Lusch’s weaknesses and strengths. Yet,
the simple fact that they have been invited to provide their interpretation
and evaluation of the article is also evidence of that article’s kairotic domi-
nance—it is a reminder, indeed, that their work has not offered a binding
unity and that Vargo and Lusch’s claim to have the vision of that unity is
the most fresh (and therefore vigorous) attempt to lay claim to providing it.
Conclusion
The foundational article of S-D logic is a tremendously rich source of
rhetorical strategy and tactics. This is amplified even further by the co-
creation of the article’s persuasive effect with the editor, Ruth Bolton, and
her decision to provide an invited set of commentaries responding to the

piece. The construction of a compelling, yet familiar, rhetorical history
that culminates early on in the central value proposition (or salvatory
vision) of an emerging unity where others had seen fragmentation is a
central element in the paper’s persuasive campaign. Of equal significance
is the suggestive use of scientisms and related lexical associations and
metonymies that convey the impression of empirical certainty and ratio-
nality, impressions that are canonically attractive to many marketing
scholars. Structural repetition through the paper functions as an argu-
mentum ad nauseam for the value proposition and the acceptability of the
evidence marshalled in its support. And binding all of these elements
together is the kairotic appreciation that this is the right moment for the
transmission of this salvatory vision—early in the new millennium, sur-
rounded by the self-regarding attentions of the old-guard of marketing
thought, the time is ripe for a new perspective to emerge. The re-framing
of fragmentation and strife as unity is made even more convincing by the
agonism that surrounds its telling, the commentaries that snipe and redi-
rect and so embody the agonism that Vargo and Lusch transform into the
virtue of common cause and understanding.
The kairotic nature of Vargo and Lusch (2004) can also be detected in
the temporary and shifting nature of some of its supporting structure.
The numbers, wording, and organisation of the foundational premises
quickly began to be revised by the authors as they responded to critique
and suggestions for extension and clarification. After publication of V&L
(2004), the authors rhetorically framed this continual responsiveness in
terms of the co-creation of “‘open source’ development”, noting that S-D
logic is a “work in progress” that they “do not claim to have invented”
and over which “they do not claim ownership” (Vargo and Lusch, 2006,
p. 51). This process of reaction and revision indicates the rhetorically
contingent nature of the foundational text—the terms set out in V&L
(2004) were effective for that purpose at that time, finally persuading the
reviewers and editor and encapsulating the initial value proposition and
its supporting rhetorical argumentation for its presentation as a piece of
scholarship designed to “move” (in the sense of Ott & Dickinson’s, 2013,
definition of rhetoric) its initial readership. Once that opening move-
ment had been accomplished, the rhetorical development of the S-D
120 C. Miles
perspective as formulated by Vargo and Lusch begins to borrow more

from Potter’s conception of rhetoric as “a feature of the antagonistic rela-
tionship between versions: how a description counters an alternative
description, and how it is organized, in turn, to resist being countered”
(Potter, 2005, p. 108). The agonistic struggle, in other words, has contin-
ued and resulted in Vargo and Lusch committing to the kairotic develop-
ment of their persuasive appeals and rhetorical argumentation. In Chap.
4, I will explore how Vargo and Lusch have organised the evolving
descriptions of the S-D logic over the years in order to oppose, forestall,
and resist discourses that have sought to offer alternative versions of their
perspective look, as well as to lead the narrative towards areas that are
more fecund for long-term suasory impact.
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4
The Rhetorical Evolution of S-D Logic
In this chapter I will explore the rhetorical evolution of S-D logic, par-
ticularly as it manifests in the changing composition and organisation of
the foundational premises and axioms. Much of what is attempted in
these changes can be seen as kairotic adjustments to the scope of the logic
and in order to fully appreciate the expansion of the service-dominant
horizon I will argue that we need to be familiar with a precursor paper
co-authored by Robert Lusch in the early 1990s. Analysis of this paper
can allow us to appreciate that what seems like an expansion of scope is,
in effect, a conservative return to an earlier, far more ambitious vision of a
universal scope for marketing. The precursor paper will also prove a
fecund point of comparison for a number of other rhetorical strategies
characteristic of S-D logic.
adical Precursors and Transcendent

R
Marketing
In 1992 Kiel, Lusch, and Schumacher published a paper entitled ‘Toward
a new paradigm for marketing: the evolutionary exchange paradigm’ in
the journal Behavioral Science, the journal of the Society for General
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46510-9_4
128 C. Miles
Systems Research. The paper is cited very rarely across the S-D Logic lit-
erature at all (it currently has just 18 citations registered by Google
Scholar) and only then generally as a quick supporting reference for the
need to consider how marketing systems are nested within other systems
(Lusch & Vargo, 2012, 2014; ‘Vargo & Lusch, 2013). However, despite
its low citation count there is something tremendously compelling about
the paper for anyone interested in the rhetoric of S-D logic as well as the
course of its conceptual development.
Kiel et al. (1992) suggest a “platform for marketing theory develop-
ment” which situates “marketing into a universal and evolutionary
exchange paradigm that integrates human exchange with that of other
living and nonliving systems” (p. 60). The paper attempts to integrate
marketing theory with the hard and soft sciences by fusing general sys-
tems theory with Kuhnian concepts of paradigm shift and evolution. The
impressive (and perhaps that is an understatement) ambition of the paper
and its reliance upon the rhetoric of evolution and paradigm make it easy
to see it as a prefiguring of Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) foundational intro-
duction of the S-D perspective, and while the later paper’s scope is
restricted to a comparatively narrow marketing management frame it
does also share with the earlier article a focus on exchange as the defining
characteristic of marketing. In addition, the two papers share a number
of significant parallels in their structure.
Both papers build themselves around a presentation of enumerated
core axioms—in Vargo and Lusch (2004) they are called “foundational
premises” and in Kiel et al. (1992), they are named “propositions”. Kiel
et al.’s “propositions” together build a “paradigm which explains all
exchange systems and properly positions marketing in this evolutionary
exchange paradigm” (p. 63). Given that exchange systems are framed as
the building blocks of the universe, the four propositions find themselves
burdened with a great deal of significance and this perhaps accounts for
their rather gnomic tone (P1, “all exchanging is the result of attraction”,
ibid.) although we certainly can detect echoes of this in the later founda-
tional premises of Vargo and Lusch (FP5 “all economies are service econ-
omies”, 2004, p. 10). Additionally, both papers build these axioms on
sweeping literature reviews that construct impressions of historical inevi-
tability in the movement of the marketing discipline. In particular, both
4 The Rhetorical Evolution of S-D Logic 129
papers argue that marketing has evolved (though without any real cri-
tique of what this term might mean when applied to the historical path
of any discipline). In order to illustrate this evolution both papers present
a narrative of the discipline’s growth broken down into four principal
eras. Kiel et al. (1992) rely upon Fisk and Meyers’ (1982) conception of
the paradigmatic development of marketing theory to provide the
grounds for their own presentation. So, Fisk and Meyers (1982) argue
that marketing begins with a paradigm of network flow, and then evolves
to one of market scarcity, then competitive marketing management, and
then a paradigm of “evolutionary systems change”. They muse that future
paradigmatic evolutions in marketing might well come from the areas of
general systems theory and work on dissipative structures. Kiel et al.
(1992) then state that as their own framework can be characterised as
being a mix of evolutionary systems change, general systems theory and
dissipative structure theory it therefore “satisfies” Fisk and Meyers’ expec-
tations for a model for “potential promise for paradigmatic development
in marketing theory” (p. 60). This is a clear rhetorical gambit for legiti-
macy although one curiously based upon a recondite text with little caché
(it is not, for example, included in Hollander et al.’s, 2005, article cover-
ing attempts to periodize marketing history, and nor is it cited in Vargo
& Lusch, 2004).
The reasons for this use of Fisk and Meyers (1982) would seem to be
their approval of evolutionary systems change and general systems theory
as approaches that are applicable to the development of contemporary
marketing theory (and its future). General systems theory (GST) is a
perfect example of an intellectual framework which sought to unite the
disparate soft and hard sciences together by trying to establish their
underlying systemic similarities, interconnections, and nestings. Initially
developed by Bertalanffy in the 1950s (and concurrently promoted in
management and organisation studies by the economist Kenneth
Boulding), GST sought to unite the sciences through the holistic investi-
gation of open systems (a system which maintains “itself in a nonequilib-
rium steady state through continual interaction with its
environment”, Hammond, 2010, p. 105). Bertalanffy noticed that the
open systems that he found in his discipline of biology could also be
found in other areas of scientific and social scientific enquiry, such as
130 C. Miles
sociology, psychology, and ecology. Fundamental to GST is that open

systems are inherently dynamic, engaging in continual exchange with
their environment in order to retain their steady state. GST is therefore a
perfect conceptual partner to Kiel et al.’s (1992) musings on the central-
ity of exchange to not only marketing but also the whole universe (and
therefore marketing’s natural place within that universe).
Explicit reference to GST is absent from Vargo and Lusch (2004),
though it is most definitely something that appears in later developments
of the S-D logic paradigm, as the authors seek to strengthen the connec-
tions between their interpretation of the service perspective and the sys-
tems of human society in general. Indeed, I will be devoting the entirety
of Chap. 6 to a detailed analysis of how adoption of the ‘emerging sys-
tems’ perspective functions rhetorically in the later instantiations of S-D
logic. However, in terms of exploring Kiel et al. (1992) as a progenitor for
V&L (2004) we can say that the former’s systems framing has been radi-
cally reduced. The principal location of systems or broader GST referents
in V&L (2004) is to be found in the use of the idea of emergence. We can
discern two ways in which emergence is used in V&L (2004). Firstly, the
word can appear in a more informal, perhaps demotic context, to indi-
cate the slow appearance of something—so, talk of “the emergence of
services marketing as a subdiscipline” (Vargo & Lusch, 2004, p. 1).
Secondly, the idea of emergence can be used in a more domain-specific,
formal way that refers to its place as a technical term in systems theory
and the broader science of complexity—seen in a phrase such as, “science
has moved from a focus on mechanics to one on dynamics, evolutionary
development, and the emergence of complex adaptive systems” (ibid.,
p. 15). In addition, we can detect instances when both of these framings
somewhat fuse together, as in a phrase like, “the view necessarily assumes
the existence of emergent relationships and evolving structures” (ibid.,
p. 12). As noted already in Chap. 3, the relationship between the lan-
guage of “dominant logic” and the frame of emergent properties of com-
plex adaptive systems is found in the work of Bettis and Prahalad (1995),
another important precursor of V&L (2004). So, we can certainly note
the lexical traces of a systems approach in V&L (2004), and this would
not be surprising given these precursors—yet the paper is very much not
presented in terms of a GST or broad ‘systems’ approach. From a
rhetorical perspective this makes sense given that any marketing article
that seriously adopts systems theory as part of its conceptual framework
must devote considerable time and effort to providing enough explana-
tion and context for it to make sense to an audience that will not be
familiar with it. It is not a field that authors in marketing can rely upon
their readers having much knowledge of and therefore unless it is abso-
lutely essential to the effectiveness of the general argument it is best left
out, or, indeed, intimated through the sort of lexical tracings that we find
in V&L (2004). Those readers who are familiar with the terminology will
recognise the points of reference, but they will only work in terms of very
vague associations for readers unfamiliar with details of GST, second-
order cybernetics, dynamic systems theory, or even the (extant in 2004)
macromarketing applications of systems theory found in the work of Fisk
(1967), Dixon (1984), Dowling (1983), Sirgy (1984), and Layton
(1981a, 1981b, 1985, 1989).
Whether for reasons of space, peer review pressure, or persuasive strat-
egy, Vargo and Lusch (2004) contains only suggestions of the systems
approach that Robert Lusch had experimented with earlier and which
both Lusch and Vargo would go on to position more centrally in S-D
logic in its later iterations. Of more immediate influence on V&L (2004)
is Kiel et al.’s (1992) overall radical ambition, and what I have already
referred to in Chap. 3 as the ‘prophetic’ or eschatological tone. Let us
recall that Vargo and Lusch (2004) depicts a dynamic arc in which mar-
keting thought has evolved to a stage that appears to most observers as
one of fragmentation but which the authors see as offering the emerging
seeds of convergence, pointing to a new dominant logic. The pattern here
is strikingly similar to that outlined in Proposition 4 in Kiel et al. (1992):
“Exchange systems progress to higher states of matter and complexity by
repeatedly evolving through four stages layer upon layer: emergence, con-
vergence, proliference, divergence” (p. 70). This pattern itself originates
in the work of one of the paper’s co-authors, Schumacher’s (1986) book,
On the Origin and Nature of Management. I would argue that Vargo and
Lush’s (2004) depiction of the historical evolution of marketing thought
reflects this emergence, convergence, proliference, divergence schema.
Most importantly, the claim that I have identified as the central value
proposition of S-D logic in Chap. 3, namely that “marketing thought is
132 C. Miles
not so much fragmented as it is evolving toward a new dominant logic”

(V&L, 2004, p. 1) is a description of marketing thought evolving to the
next phase of complexity. In other words, in the terms of Kiel et al.
(1992), the emerging paradigm that Vargo and Lusch (2004) identify is
not simply the next step in a continuing progression; it is the point at
which the entire exchange system of marketing evolves to the next stage
of complexity. This is qualitatively different to the previous stages in the
evolution of marketing thought because it represents the leap to a new
level in a way that marketing has so far not experienced. The four stages
of marketing presented in V&L (2004)—classical and neo-classical eco-
nomics, early formative marketing, marketing management, and market-
ing as social and economic process—reflect the stages of emergence (of
early attempts to outline and identify the topic area), convergence (into a
recognisable discipline), proliference (of the discipline across the intel-
lectual landscape), and divergence (of perspectives, interpretations and
frameworks within the discipline). According to Kiel et al. (1992, p. 70)
these stages “are hierarchical and sequential” in that each of the earlier
stages are ‘layered’ inside the forthcoming ones. This hierarchical layering
is a crucial point for the presentation of S-D logic in V&L (2004), of
course, as we see the goods-dominant logic subsumed within the new
service-dominant perspective. This is not the violent overthrow of revolu-
tion or “reinvention”, but rather the evolving, organic progress of “revi-
sion”, “reorientation”, and “refocus” (vide Vargo & Lusch, 2004, p. 14).
However, the final phase, divergence, evolves into a new layer of com-
plexity that itself becomes the emergence of an entirely new cycle. Within
this framework, the emergence of the new dominant logic signals the
beginning of a new four stage cycle embodying a higher level of complex-
ity than the previous cycle. Vargo and Lusch (2004) do not describe the
new dominant logic in these terms drawn from Kiel et al. (1992) and in
turn, Schumacher (1986) and Prigogine and Stengers (1984). They do
not make claims that the emerging S-D logic will display a higher level of
complexity. Yet, as we will see in this chapter and in Chap. 6, as S-D logic
begins to solidify and its systems theory framings begin to become more
manifest, the complexity that it seeks to embody amplifies.
Vargo and Lusch’s choice in the 2004 foundational paper to adopt a
framing for the evolutionary movement of marketing thought drawn
from Kuhnian paradigm shifts can be interpreted as rhetorically strategic

when compared with the possibility of returning to the four stage,
hierarchical systems framework used in Kiel et al. (1992). As noted in
Chap. 3, the concept of Kuhnian paradigms had become, by the time
that Vargo and Lusch were writing, part of the common conceptual tool
box that marketing scholars could be relied upon to be familiar with. This
would largely not have been the case with the work of Prigogine and most
certainly not with that of Schumacher. Despite the fact that Kuhn’s the-
ory of paradigms does not easily fit within the sort of evolutionary pro-
gression that Vargo and Lusch (2004) describes, and despite the fact that
a marketing scholar as noteworthy as Shelby Hunt had already devoted
much time and effort to demonstrating its intellectual bankruptcy, it still
can be relied upon as a point of common knowledge in the target audi-
ence from which to construct an argument. Such points of common
knowledge, or topoi as Aristotle called them (Aristotle, 1991), are impor-
tant for rhetors as they provide stepping stones of agreement and reso-
nance between rhetor and audience (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca,
1971; Tindale, 2010). Explaining from scratch the Kiel et al. (1992)
theory of a four stage, ever heightening complexity of evolution would be
impossible in a Journal of Marketing article limited by word count and
the need to start from a position of common understanding with the
audience. Once the Kuhnian cloak of convenience has done its job, how-
ever, it is quickly abandoned by the authors in the later work developing
S-D logic where, slowly, more of the systems focus begins to seep back
into the conceptual framework.
One notable way in which the four-stage, hierarchical evolutionary
cycle continues to haunt S-D logic is the choice of the Maori Koru sym-
bol to be the visual symbol for S-D logic as used on the website sdlogic.
net and on the cover of the Lusch and Vargo (2014). I discuss the use of
this spiral symbol in depth in Chap. 5, but it is only through an apprecia-
tion of the spirality of dynamic systems evolution as formulated by Kiel
et al. (1992) that the significance of the Koru (and some of the other
spiral figures and metaphors used by Vargo and Lusch) comes into
true focus.
The final aspect of Kiel et al. (1992) that it is fruitful to examine from
a rhetorical perspective is its recruitment of the work of the late Romanian
134 C. Miles
economist, Anghel Rugina, particularly a paper that he wrote in 1989

arguing that “it is possible to build a methodological bridge between eco-
nomics and all other natural sciences” (Rugina, 1989, p. 6). Rugina starts
his argument from what he terms the “universal hypothesis of duality”,
which states that “the physical universe where our planet is located is
composed of stable (equilibrium) and unstable (disequilibrium) ele-
ments, forces, values, institutions and behaviour in general terms of inan-
imate and animate bodies” (p. 14). This duality has resulted in two
separate intellectual models of the universe, broadly called Classical and
Modern, the former seeking to construct the world as satisfying “the con-
ditions of stable equilibrium” and the latter building a “different frame-
work where the conditions of stable equilibrium are negated or do not
exist at all, which means disequilibrium” (p. 15). Rugina then goes on to
provide a number of further hypotheses and axioms which I do not have
the space to go into here (fascinating as they are). However, the (dense)
article culminates in the presentation of the “Orientation Table”, a
“methodological apparatus conceived for orientation and clarification”
which presents seven models that “represent all possible concepts and
theorems arranged in a systematic manner following their methodologi-
cal habitat” (p. 17). Each of the models is characterised by a different
degree of combination of five basic “building blocks”—G (gravity), NaPa
(“a fixed centre or axis in the body of consistent or stable matter or ele-
ments”), X (anti- gravity), Y (“disgravitation quantum”, effectively the
shadow of NaPa in that it represents a “shaky moving axis of an incon-
stant or unstable piece of matter”), and R (the appropriate space-time
framework).
There are a number of things that should be of interest to us here. We
can note, for example, the distinctly dualistic nature of Rugina’s concep-
tion, redolent, indeed of Empedocles’ argument that the two opposing
forces of the cosmos are love and strife. This is particularly important
because Kiel et al. (1992) build their “evolutionary exchange paradigm”
upon a slightly one-sided interpretation of this motif. For them, remem-
ber, “all exchanging is the result of attraction” (p. 63). In the same way
that Rugina appeals to the elementary forces of the universe in order to
describe his seven models of the Organisational Table, so Kiel et al.
(1992) point to the lessons of “elementary Newtonian physics” (ibid.)
and the Big Bang to demonstrate that everything in the universe is either
attracted or repulsed. They therefore embed the discipline and practice of
marketing within basic universal forces of nature rather than simply
interpret it as a social, or even simply human, phenomenon. When study-
ing marketing we are studying the same forces of attraction that can be
seen throughout the physical universe. And, in this way, marketing is
fundamentally locked into the same frame as the hard sciences. This was
Rugina’s own rhetorical strategy in his series of articles in the late 1980s
for the International Journal of Social Economics; he attempted to link his
discipline of economics with the hard sciences by demonstrating that it
concerned itself with the same five building blocks from the Organisational
Table that the other sciences did.
Kiel et al. (1992) are clearly inspired by Rugina’s argumentation as well
as his sense of scale. They begin their argument by asserting that, “the
historical roots of marketing are imbedded in classical economics” (p. 61).
They then claim that economics itself provided the “evolutionary para-
digm” for Darwin’s work, influenced as it was by Smith and Malthus. I
would claim that this short sequence of argumentation is tremendously
important in properly understanding not only Kiel et al. (1992) but the
S-D Logic that rests upon its foundations. Evolution conceptually arises
out of economics; economics (vide Rugina) deals with the basic building
blocks of the physical universe; marketing is a sub-discipline of econom-
ics (and thus partakes in its expression of physical truths); and marketing
specifically deals with attraction, one of those basic building blocks (and
thus has a clear disciplinary realm within the sciences). A persuasive,
evolving lineage is being constructed here. And while marketing has been
particularly obsessed with drawing its lineage over and over again (see the
twenty-eight “well-known periodizations” tabularised in Hollander et al.,
2005) this version caps them all in ambition and ramifications for not
only does it make marketing part of a re-framed economics (now the
Queen of Sciences) it also connects it to both the conceptualisation and
instantiation of evolutionary movement. Marketing, in taking as its sub-
ject the universal force of “evolutionary attraction” (p. 64), is siding with
the constructive, with the positive (to go back to our Empedoclean dual-
ism), for it is attraction which is moving forward, away from the great
repulsion of the Big Bang. It is attraction which produces order and so
136 C. Miles
the negentropy of information. A marketing which is, as it were, self-

aware, able to fully understand its place in describing the workings of the
force of attraction in open dynamic systems, thus becomes the epitome
of the discipline’s intellectual evolution. The discipline would be waking
up to the truth of itself.
Taken within the context of Kiel et al. (1992), Vargo and Lusch (2004)
can be seen as a more rhetorically strategic, less ambitious repositioning
of the grand schema for marketing outlined in the former paper. It relies
upon a similar narrative of evolutionary movement, uses much similar
terminology, has a very similar structure, and attempts to build a bold
new framework for marketing which seeks to drag it out of its moribund
lack of self-awareness. Yet, it also has appeared to learn some strategic
rhetorical lessons. Vargo and Lusch (2004) make little attempt to move
outside the discipline of marketing itself—their ambitions are restricted
in that sense (though they have suggested that this was a constraint forced
upon them by reviewers, see Lusch & Vargo, 2006, p. 1). Their key argu-
mentation steps make much more use of literature from within the field.
Indeed, the sheer weight of marketing literature cited is one of the most
obvious differences between the two papers. This is, of course, one of the
problems with creating arguments whose scope is so very wide. Rugina
(1989) and Kiel et al. (1992) set their sights on the universe and so their
terms of reference inevitably become intensely trans-disciplinary. Such a
scope will be challenging for the Journal of Marketing and the wide swath
of its readers, who do not come to it for unnerving speculation on the
nature of universal forces and processes but rather seek to read, “market-
ing knowledge grounded in scholarly research” (JoM, 2004). The edito-
rial goals for the journal at the time of the publication of V&L (2004)
were “1. the advancement of the science and practice of marketing (to
make a difference by adding to what we know about marketing phenom-
ena and changing how we study and practice marketing); 2. to serve as a
bridge between the scholarly and the practical, each of which has a vital
stake in what’s happening on the other side” (JoM, 2004). The focus on
the practical here is clearly a steer that would make anyone seeking to
draw links between the subatomic, the economic, the societal, and the
galactic rather wary of submission. Furthermore, the issue of what is
appropriate scope for marketing scholarship is a topic that had already
been heavily debated within the Journal of Marketing’s pages since its
foundation. Hunt (1976) attempts to constructively summarise the
“growing consensus” amongst marketers regarding the acceptable scope
of marketing and presents the various elements that there might be more
or less agreement on in an eight-celled table. While that table does include
topic areas such as political and public service advertising, the efficiency
of distribution systems for public goods, and the recycling of public
goods, as well as tensions around issues of consumer sovereignty, power
dynamics in distribution channels, and whether “marketing functions are
universal” (p. 21), it does not include any indication that marketing con-
nects to, or reflects, any level of reality below or above the human. So,
given Vargo and Lusch’s awareness of the “contentious” (Lusch & Vargo,
2006a, p. 1) nature of their argument in V&L (2004), restricting them-
selves largely to the narrow scope of marketing management reduces their
exposure to objections and counter-arguments based on topics that are
not essential to the presentation of the foundational premises.
In closing this consideration of Kiel et al. (1992), it should be noted
that even though the full scale of its grand schema for marketing’s place
in the universe does not make its way into V&L (2004) something of its
visionary tone certainly does. It is slightly paradoxical that works such as
Kiel et al. (1992) and Rugina (1989), that attempt to thoroughly contex-
tualise their disciplines within the physical sciences, communicate their
arguments in a tone of voice that might be described as visionary or even
transcendent. Indeed, this is a characteristic that can be noted of aspects of
both systems theory and its close relation, second-order cybernetics. This
is not surprising given Kenneth Boulding’s (1956) early insistence on the
inclusion of the “transcendental level” as the final “turret” in his delinea-
tion of the GST “hierarchy of systems” (p. 206). In modern marketing,
the turret of transcendence has tended to be kept quite grounded by the
popularity of the metaphor of myopia. Levitt’s (1960) exploration of how
“management inevitably drifts in the direction of thinking of itself as
producing goods and services, not customer satisfactions” (p. 145) has
served as a common touchstone for marketing scholars seeking to pro-
mote a ‘meta’-view of a problem or system without needing to have
recourse to a potentially challenging (in a discipline beset with scientisms)
transcendent modality. Myopia is a metaphor that appeals to an
138 C. Miles
instrumentalist or operationalist perspective—we feel we all have a pretty

good handle on what are the causes of myopia, its ramifications, as well
as how it can be corrected effectively. So, while there is nothing mysteri-
ous about it, we nevertheless instinctively understand how it can danger-
ously limit our worldview. It is a simple flaw in our visual apparatus that
can profoundly impact what we see of the world, how we experience it
and, therefore, how we know it. The discovery of a myopia in our schol-
arly and/or practitioner worldview is therefore a perfect way to describe
the need for a ‘levelling-up’ (in its original gaming sense rather than its
impoverished recasting in political idiom), a re-adjustment of systemic
perspective to a higher level, a meta-focus. The myopia metaphor carries
with it the alluring connotation that it is all just a matter of a simple, easy
‘adjustment’ in thinking and we can gain the new wisdom that this most
unthreatening of transcendences can afford. This goes someway to
explaining the continued resonance of Levitt’s choice of metaphor in
marketing scholarship. We have “the new marketing myopia” (Craig-
Smith et al., 2010), “global marketing myopia” (Douglas, 1986), “a new
form of marketing myopia” (Kotler & Levy, 1969), “tourism marketing
myopia” (March, 1994), “sustainability marketing myopia” (Villarino &
Font, 2015), “green marketing myopia” (Ottman et al., 2006), “corpo-
rate marketing myopia” (Balmer, 2011), “academia marketing myopia”
(Boddy, 2007), and, the imprimatur nonpareil of marketing scholarly
influence, we have even had an attempt to provide an ‘integrated’ frame-
work of marketing myopias (Richard et al., 1992).
Vargo and Lusch (2004) stay reasonably clear of the dampening effect
of the myopia metaphor and so avoid the cut-price approach to transcen-
dence that is its hallmark. Instead, through the adoption of a hybrid
metaphorical lexicon drawn from discourses of evolution, logic, and gen-
eral systems theory the authors construct a generalised sense of scientifi-
cally determined, and historically inevitable, progression that stops short
of openly arguing for the new dominant paradigm as a meta-level transi-
tion. However, while the grander, transcendent implications of Lusch’s
earlier general systems-inspired work are strategically held back in their
hybrid lexicon for the 2004 paper, it is possible to see their trace in its
central value proposition, with its intimation that we are experiencing the
point at which the entire exchange system of marketing is evolving to the
next stage of complexity. V&L (2004) can perhaps be seen, therefore, as

a subtle (initial) correction to the myopic effect of the marketing myopia
idiom, re-framing a metaphor of vision around a visionary perception of
the truth behind the curtain, the order behind the chaos, in a way that
might prefigure (and presage) a later return to a broader systems framing
in the S-D logic oeuvre and a stronger engagement with the trope of
meta-level transition. Indeed, one notes the overt engagement with the
general systems theory conceptualisation of transcendence in later work
by the authors (vide Vargo & Lusch, 2017, the seeds for which may even
be seen in Vargo, 2007). This general dynamic will hopefully become
clearer as we move towards a consideration of the way in which Vargo
and Lusch’s persuasive discourse system has evolved since the 2004 foun-
dational paper. The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to the ini-
tial steps in this consideration, namely an exploration of the rhetorical
strategies traceable in the changing structures of S-D logic’s foundational
premises.
Rhetorical Analysis of the Evolving Premise

A
Structure of S-D Logic
The object of the following analysis is to investigate the rhetorical signifi-
cance of the changing formulations of S-D logic’s foundational premises.
This must inevitably focus at the lexical level and so to get us started we
need a mapping of how the wording and structure of the premises has
changed over the years. Vargo and Lusch have always been open regard-
ing the evolving nature of the FPs (vide Vargo & Lusch, 2008a, 2016,
2017), and displays of theory growth, evolution, and adaptation can
themselves be rhetorically powerful arguments for intellectual flexibility,
maturity, and, therefore, credibility. However, the emphasis in Vargo and
Lusch’s development of the FPs has tended largely to be on where they are
at any one moment in time rather than a detailed consideration of how
and why the wording and structure might have changed over the course
of that development. In addition, certain exchanges with critics of S-D
logic over its development, particularly the back-and-forth with
140 C. Miles
O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy in the pages of the European Journal

of Marketing (Lusch & Vargo, 2011; Vargo & Lusch, 2011b;
O’Shaughnessy & O’Shaughnessy, 2009, 2011), leave one with the dis-
tinct impression that dwelling too much on the early stages of the devel-
opment of S-D logic is something that the authors consider to be wasted
time—what is important is the current formulation rather than those
that have gone before. Indeed, the reader unfamiliar with the historical
development of S-D logic would have to wait until the final chapter (and
721st page) of The SAGE Handbook of Service-Dominant Logic to finally
come across a short discussion (Vargo, 2019) of the ways in which the
FPs have changed over the years.
Tables 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5 below set out the transformations
and transitions that the foundational premises have undergone from
2004 to the time of writing (2023). Changes in, or additions to, phrasing
across the versions are indicated in italics. It should be noted that while
the number, structure and wording of the FPs has ostensibly remained
constant since Vargo and Lusch (2016), there appears to be an increasing
move towards presenting the 5 axioms, introduced initially as a super-
structure for the FPs in Vargo and Lusch (2016), as entirely supplanting
the FPs. While there does not seem to have been a formally announced
decision to abandon the FPs, the latest ‘foundational’ statement of the
S-D logic does not include them (vide Vargo et al., 2020). We will exam-
ine the rhetorical ramifications of this move, alongside the presentation
of other elements in a wider meta-structure around the axioms and
FPs, below.
Table 4.1 Original FPs (Vargo & Lusch, 2004)

FP1 The application of specialized skills and knowledge is the fundamental
unit of exchange
FP2 Indirect exchange masks the fundamental unit of exchange
FP3 Goods are distribution mechanisms for service provision
FP4 Knowledge is the fundamental source of competitive advantage
FP5 All economies are services economies
FP6 The customer is always a coproducer
FP7 The enterprise can only make value propositions
FP8 A service-centered view is customer oriented and relational
Table 4.2 FPs 1st revision (Vargo & Lusch, 2006)

FP1 The application of specialized skills and knowledge is the fundamental
unit of exchange
FP2 Indirect exchange masks the fundamental unit of exchange
FP4 Knowledge is the fundamental source of competitive advantage
FP5 All economies are services economies
FP6 The customer is always a co-creator of value
FP7 The enterprise can only make value propositions
FP8 A service-centered view is customer oriented and relational
FP9 Organizations exist to integrate and transform microspecialized
competences into complex services that are demanded in the
marketplace
Table 4.3 FPs 2nd revision (Vargo & Lusch, 2008a)

FP1 Service is the fundamental basis of exchange
FP2 Indirect exchange masks the fundamental basis of exchange
FP3 Goods are a distribution mechanism for service provision
FP4 Operant resources are the fundamental source of competitive advantage
FP5 All economies are service economies
FP6 The customer is always a co-creator of value
FP7 The enterprise cannot deliver value, but only offer value propositions
FP8 A service-centered view is inherently customer oriented and relational
FP9 All social and economic actors are resource integrators
FP10 Value is always uniquely and phenomenologically determined by the
beneficiary
Table 4.4 FPs 3rd revision (Lusch & Vargo, 2014)

Axiom 1 FP1 Service is the fundamental basis of exchange
FP3 Goods are a distribution mechanism for service provision
FP4 Operant resources are the fundamental source of competitive
advantage
Axiom 2 FP6 The customer is always a co-creator of value
FP7 The enterprise cannot deliver value, but only offer value
propositions
FP8 A service-centered view is inherently customer oriented and
relational
Axiom 3 FP9 All economic and social actors are resource integrators
Axiom 4 FP10 Value is always uniquely and phenomenologically determined
by the beneficiary
Note: In-text FPs are different from diagrammatic formulation given on
p. 53 of article
142 C. Miles
Table 4.5 FPs 4th revision (Vargo & Lusch, 2016)

Axiom 1 FP1 Service is the fundamental basis of exchange
FP4 Operant resources are the fundamental source of strategic
benefit
Axiom 2 FP6 Value is co-created by multiple actors, always including the
beneficiary
FP7 Actors cannot deliver value but can participate in the creation
and offering of value propositions.
FP8 A service-centered view is inherently beneficiary oriented and
relational
Axiom 3 FP9 All social and economic actors are resource integrators
Axiom 4 FP10 Value is always uniquely and phenomenologically determined
by the beneficiary
Axiom 5 FP11 Value co-creation is coordinated through actor-generated
institutions and institutional arrangements
Rhetoric and Revision
We can approach the changing formulations and structurings of the S-D

logic FPs from a number of different rhetorical perspectives. Public revi-
sion of the foundational premises of a ‘logic’ might seem to be an admit-
tance of significant weaknesses in original reasoning and argumentation.
The logic metaphor brings with it certain assumptions regarding the
necessity of correct premises for further reasoning—if the premises need
to be changed then how much of the reasoning in V&L (2004) remains
solid? So, revision introduces the danger of undermining the ethos of the
logic. On the other hand, we might point to the pathos of a communi-
cated stance of openness and flexibility—redolent of the true spirit of
scientific endeavour and perhaps indicating an admirable absence of
hubris or ego. Certainly, the first revision of the FPs has been portrayed
by Vargo and Lusch as a response to their “own realization” and the
“simultaneous” pointing out by “several marketing scholars” that their
use of the phrase “co-production” in the original FP6 was an unfortunate
continuance of the goods-dominant lexicon (Lusch & Vargo, 2006b,
p. 284). In revising FP6’s wording from “coproducer” to “co-creator of
value”, Vargo and Lusch demonstrate the sticky, entrapping nature of our
socialization into the lexicon of goods-dominant logic. Indeed, as they

note in a related context, “nowhere is the paradigmatic potency of G-D
logic more evident than when one tries to speak precisely about S-D logic
using a lexicon developed in association with G-D logic” (ibid., p. 286).
The revision of FP6 makes it clear that even the founders of S-D logic can
still be unconsciously mired in the language of the goods-dominant para-
digm—and this allows us all to realise both the subtle manner in which
the old way of thinking is entrenched even in apparently ‘new’ concepts
like coproduction as well as the open attitude of the founders in readily
admitting their failing and quickly correcting it. The importance of
choosing the appropriate lexicon for the discourse of S-D logic is some-
thing that Vargo and Lusch underlined from the very start of their expo-
sition of the service-dominant perspective. They note in V&L (2004,
p. 14) that marketing thinkers before them have “indicated that the basic
lexicon of marketing is derived from a goods-based, manufacturing
exchange perspective”. Such a situation means that “academic marketing
may need to rethink and revise some of the lexicon”, though this should
“not necessarily require discarding the goods-centered counterpart”
(ibid.). In the context of these statements, the revision of FP6 in Lusch
and Vargo (2006b) can actually be seen as a form of ‘leading by example’.
Indeed, in their explanation of the thinking behind the change of phrase,
Lusch and Vargo (2006b) are careful to explain their process in terms that
align perfectly with their examples of lexicon reorientation in V&L
(2004); goods-dominant ‘co-production’ has not been erased, but rather
subordinated under the larger service-oriented phrasing of the ‘co-creation
of value’. The trope of subordination is important here—it is part of the
general attempt to present S-D logic as something that does not destroy
but builds, not a revolution but a reorientation. However, a ‘reorienta-
tion’ of the marketing lexicon based upon older, standard terms becom-
ing subordinate to new terms (or old terms re-defined with new meaning)
contains the potential for misunderstanding and confusion. And, indeed,
this is something that Vargo and Lusch recognise as one of the principle
thorns in the side of increasing acceptance of the service-dominant per-
spective. So, in Vargo and Lusch (2006, p. 286), they reflect that “repeat-
edly, we have either noticed (or have had it pointed out to us) that: (1)
the connotations of the words we are using are oblique, if not orthogonal,
144 C. Miles
to the ideas we are espousing; and/or (2) what we are trying to say is mis-
understood”. This clearly remains a major issue even after many years of
development. Vargo and Lusch (2016, p. 8) mention “continuing misun-
derstanding” of their use of the phrase ‘co-creation’, for example. Indeed,
slightly later, Lusch and Vargo (2019, p. 4) note that while “the S-D logic
narrative is a fairly simple one”, “to the novice reader, it can be a challenge
to grasp, at least initially”. This “challenge” is located precisely in its lexi-
con, which is “necessarily mostly the same lexicon associated with the
traditional understandings” of goods-dominant logic while “some of
these concepts have connotations that are different” from those tradi-
tional understandings. The authors admit that this lexical layering can
make the “novice reader struggle somewhat” and lead to “a premature
rejection of some of the core ideas of S-D logic” (Lusch & Vargo, 2019,
p. 7). They caution that approaching S-D logic for the first time requires
a mind-set “willing to study carefully” and prepared for “some thoughtful
reading and reflection, along with an open mind” (ibid.). Pointedly, they
then go on to explain that, “this Handbook [i.e. the 800 page SAGE
Handbook of Service-Dominant Logic] is intended to assist in the transi-
tion of this mindset” (ibid.). In other words, although the core message
of S-D logic is “fairly simple” the mire of goods-dominant lexical tradi-
tion makes its understanding fraught with pitfalls and traps. This is, in
itself, a fascinating persuasive strategy to ensure the continued need for
scholarly exegesis by the founders and their anointed co-creators; ‘Yes, we
see that you are struggling with our meta-theoretical framework and have
arrived at a series of objections and rejections, but, you see, you have not really
understood the language that we use. Only when you have carefully absorbed
the nuanced connotations of our, admittedly confusing, lexicon will you be
able to truly understand this quite straightforward of logics’ (my prosopopoeia
is entirely for rhetorical purposes, of course).
In the terms discussed above, revision of lexical choices in the FPs
would seem to part of an ongoing project to make S-D logic more con-
sumable and less prone to misunderstanding by “novice readers”. This
form of revision can be seen as part of Potter’s understanding of rhetoric
as “a feature of the antagonistic relationship between versions: how a
description counters an alternative description, and how it is organized,
in turn, to resist being countered” (Potter, 2005, p. 108). The revision of
the FPs seeks to organise them to ‘resist being countered’. Countered by

critics and detractors, yes, but also more broadly countered by the implicit
goods-dominant understandings inculcated by traditional marketing
scholarship, practice, and education. Given Vargo and Lusch’s recogni-
tion of just how confusing the S-D logic’s layering of its own lexicon
upon that established by the subordinated goods-dominant logic can be,
one might ask why they have not poured their efforts into generating a
new lexicon entirely, one that would not suffer from being haunted by the
understandings of traditional marketing? Yet, they are prevented from
doing so by the emphasis on re-orientation rather than revolution, by the
very stance that seeks to portray S-D logic as a perspective that subordi-
nates the older framework. We cannot erase ‘production’ from our S-D
logic lexicon, for that would constitute an absurd attempt to pretend as if
production cannot be a part of an enterprise’s activities. Such a radical
overturning of lexicon and paradigm would be unlikely to resonate with
many. Instead, ‘production’ is subordinated to service provision in a man-
ner that illustrates the ‘folding-in’ of goods-dominant concepts into the
broader, emergent meta-structure of S-D logic. Yet, as Vargo and Lusch’s
ongoing recognition of the “struggle” that this non-revolutionary strategy
brings to the novice’s engagement with their concepts demonstrates, the
goods-dominant lexicon (and the perspectives that the lexicon enshrines)
constantly threatens the promotion of S-D logic understandings. It is fair
to wonder, given the vast literature that S-D logic has inspired (and there-
fore the large amount of careful explanations that do exist in the scholarly
space regarding the re-oriented lexicon) whether this strategy is ‘win-
ning’, or at least whether the energy that has to be continually put into
disambiguation and clarification is an efficient expenditure? But perhaps
such a question ignores the reality of the gambit already played: the non-
revolutionary stance of V&L (2004) allowed for its initial (largely) posi-
tive reception but was also ‘baked into’ its value proposition—that what
seemed like fragmentation could instead be seen as an emerging logic
(rather than an overturning one).
Revision becomes a tool in the battle against misinterpretation and
misunderstanding. It allows Vargo and Lusch to respond to criticism by
demonstrating their commitment to clarity but also by demonstrating
their commitment to the continuing development of the meta-theoretical
146 C. Miles
framework. Each revision is an effort to shore up the FPs against further

misinterpretation but also to integrate further refinements and shifts of
focus into the ‘core’ expressions of the logic’s offering. However, as I shall
argue below, there is a strange tension that grows in the revisions over
time—the tension between the urge to clarify and the urge to complicate,
between moves that seem to disambiguate while at the same time increas-
ing ambiguity.
The first revision of the FPs (Vargo & Lusch, 2006) also contained an
entire additional FP as well as the simple lexical substitution of FP6. FP9
introduced the idea that organisations functioned as ‘competency’ inte-
grators and transformers, giving a clearer idea of how the enterprise ‘oper-
ationalizes’ operant resources into value offerings. The lexicon that they
used in the original FP9, however, was clearly restrictive, both in its scope
(firms) and, one imagines, its lexical choices (‘micro-specialised compe-
tences’ being an arguably ‘old lexicon’ construction). As Vargo and Lusch
noted, “before the ink was dry on FP9 we realized that the resource inte-
gration role of the firm is equally applicable to individuals and house-
holds” (Lusch & Vargo, 2006b, p. 283). However, despite being unhappy
with the wording they “did not formally change the formulation” until
two years later, in the special issue devoted to S-D logic of the Journal of
the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS), as part of the 2nd revision of
the FPs (Vargo & Lusch, 2008a). This highlights another aspect of revi-
sion, which is its ritual or ceremonial nature. The question of when and
in what venue to announce revisions to the FPs is a question of kairos, of
course—the rhetorical choice of right time and place. A special issue of
the JAMS, with 15 articles devoted to “continuing the dialog” around the
logic would seem like a perfect opportunity to rationalise and extend the
FPs. The special issue is a supportive, celebratory venue because it dem-
onstrates strongly the continuing relevance and scholarly engagement
Vargo and Lusch’s work has attracted and therefore generates a persuasive
ethos around the S-D logic project and efforts to maintain its develop-
mental trajectory. The same kairos is true for the first set of revisions, of
course, Lusch and Vargo’s (2006a) edited collection of 32 essays on the
newly emerged S-D logic that works as a greatly expanded version of the
commentaries chosen to surround the original publication of V&L
(2004). In this sense, we can see that the first two revisions use the same
ethos-generating mechanism of surrounding their announcement with

clear proof of the project’s resonance for marketing scholars that was so
successful for V&L (2004). This turns the announcement of the revisions
into a more significantly ‘public’ or ceremonial event than would other-
wise be the case. This is echoed in explaining why the wording of FP9 had
to wait almost two years to be “formally changed”; the authors waited for
a situation that fitted the epideictic formality they knew by experience
would help support their announcement of a revision.
The third revision (vide Table 4.4) is provided in Lusch and Vargo’s
(2014) “basic primer on S-D logic” (p. xxii), published by Cambridge
University Press. It is here that Vargo and Lusch formally perform the
‘axiomisation’ of the FPs. Interestingly, the structure of the book seems to
play with potential sources of lexical confusion—the first part of the
book is labelled ‘Premises’ and the opening section is entitled ‘The
Service-Dominant Mindset’ yet this does not contain a listing or explica-
tion of the FPs at all—instead there is a review of foundational concepts
to the logic and the introduction of the axioms (only four at this stage).
The FPs are then listed and fully described under a later section called
‘Foundational Premises and Axioms’. In other words, given that this is a
primer to the logic, the FPs appear to be being moved into the back-
ground, while the new axioms are foregrounded. This undoubtedly makes
the presentation of the core S-D logic concepts more streamlined at the
start of the book—four basic axioms for a system make for an easily
digestible catechism (half the length of the original eight FPs from V&L,
2004, after all). The assertion that Vargo and Lusch make is that the four
FPs that they are presenting now as axioms are the “four FPs in particular
that capture the essence of S-D logic” (Lusch & Vargo, 2014, p. 14). The
remaining FPs “could arguably be derived” from the four Axioms. Their
use of the rather heavily modal qualifier, “could arguably”, is surprising
and somewhat unnerving given that it admits of the possibility that some
might argue that they could not be derived in such a way. It sets up a sub-
tly shaky ontological and epistemological relationship between the four
chosen axiomatic FPs and those that have not been elevated. The shaki-
ness of this relationship is further amplified by the authors’ statement
that “the structure and order of the FPs under the axioms are used pri-
marily for pedagogical purposes” (p. 54), to which they attach an
148 C. Miles
endnote that reads, “There are other ways to organize the FPs. For
instance, often in presentations we organize as follows: FP1:4, 5; FP6: 3,
7; FP9: 2; FP10: 8” (p. 80). These two statements effectively indicate that
the ‘derivation’ of specific FPs from specific axioms is an arbitrary, shifting
construct. How can the FPs be truly derived from the axioms if in one
place and time FP3 can be derived from Axiom 1 whereas in another it
can be derived from Axiom 2? What pedagogical purpose can be served
through such a shifting structure? This undermines the structural impor-
tance of the remnant FPs, leaving the axioms as the only stable founda-
tions. This is underlined by another statement (delivered in a tone that it
is hard not to equate with the rhythm and structure of a hypnotic sugges-
tion), that “as you become more familiar with the FPs and all of their
intricacies you will begin to see how all of the FPs relate to each other but
with the four axioms as the most fundamental” (p. 53). This is then fol-
lowed with the intriguing summary, “in brief, six FPs are nested under
four axioms” (ibid.), which seems to suggests that what is important for
an FP is being nested under an axiom rather than being derived from any
particular axiom (i.e. we can shuffle the remnant FPs around under the
axioms and not lose meaning or significance). So, broadly, the FPS and
axioms are related to each other in a shifting, non-determinant manner
that we will begin to understand after sufficient study and reflection.
The 2014 axiomisation of the FPs is accompanied, then, by a signifi-
cant amount of what we might call ‘destabilising rhetoric’—discourse
strategies that reposition, rearrange, redirect and diffuse while nominally
engaged in explication and reification. Added into this mix is a strategy
reminiscent of occult writings about the ineffable, wherein the shifting,
ambiguous, confusing nature of a text’s structure and lexicon is used as a
pedagogical goad for careful study of, and meditation on, a text in order
to understand its hidden, or ‘true’, meaning (Gunn, 2004), or as Vargo
and Lusch might have it, to discover “how all the FPs relate to each other”.
The confusion, or destabilisation, is further compounded by Lusch
and Vargo’s (2014) introduction of the “necessary concepts and ideas
behind S-D logic” (p. xxiii) before the FPs or even the axioms are delin-
eated. These concepts thus become more ‘foundational’ to the logic than
the FPs themselves, even though there is clearly a strong relationship (and
obvious elements of repetition) between the three categories of concepts,
axioms, and premises. The “necessary concepts” that are at the root of the
“service-dominant mindset” are:
• Human specializations, and the exchange systems that we develop to

facilitate them “for efficiency and coordination purposes” (p. 4).
• The goods-dominant “centricities” limit and impoverish our under-
standing of the “nature of the market, value creation and the mutual
roles of the various actors” (pp. 7–8) involved.
• “Transcendence” (p. 8) is afforded by the actor-to-actor (A2A) per-
spective, which is superordinate to existing, narrow foci such as B2B,
C2C, B2C, etc.
• All actors have the “common purpose” of “value creation through
resource integration and service for service exchange” (p. 9).
• Service is “the transcending, and thus the unifying concept for under-
standing economic exchange in all economies” (p.11).
• All economic sectors “are driven by human ingenuity used for the ben-
efit of others, which in turn, reciprocally benefits the servicing
party” (p. 11)
• Goods are “appliances that act as intermediaries in service deliv-
ery” (p. 12)
• There are two types of resources, operand (“generally static resources
that require some action to be performed on them before they can
provide value”) and operant (“resources capable of acting on other
resources to create value”, p. 13). Operant resources are “primary”
because operand resources need operant resources to be applied to
them before any value can be realised from them.
Once these concepts have been introduced and illustrated, Lusch and
Vargo (2014) go on to list the four foundational premises “that might be
considered to be the axioms of S-D logic” (p. 14). Again, one notes the
use of modal, hedging language here that has the curious consequence of
both delineating something and yet at the same time destabilising it.
Additionally, there is little clarity about the relationship between the pre-
vious section outlining the “necessary concepts” and the axioms—why
aren’t the concepts made axiomatic? Or are the axioms simply formula-
tions of the concepts? One section ends, the other begins—no bridging
150 C. Miles
provided. The relationship is made even more unclear when we find that
the first axiom, “service is the fundamental basis of exchange” is “based
on the previously introduced definition of service: the application of
operant resources (knowledge and skill) for the benefit of another actor”.
Yet, this definition has not been provided previously in those words—
which begs the question, ‘why not’? And then the further question of,
‘why isn’t this definition of service axiomatic’? If the first axiom is based on
another definition, shouldn’t that be the first axiom? At this stage, the
careful, reflective reader should be quite confused as to what is founda-
tional, axiomatic, or necessary and what is the difference between all of
these things and the idea of a premise.
Given the large amount of attention that Vargo and Lusch have given
to the matter of lexical nuance and its potential for misunderstanding
and confusion it is very difficult to interpret the way the concepts, axi-
oms and FPs are framed in Lusch and Vargo (2014) as anything other
than a rhetorical strategy to introduce uncertainty in the reader’s mind
regarding the exact differentiation between these things. Yet, what is the
persuasive value in this strategy? Rhetoric is usually involved in the
reduction of uncertainty around an issue, in persuading an audience to
see something in this way rather than that. Although another way of
looking at this is to realise that rhetoric functions because of uncer-
tainty—environments which are certain and stable tend to require rhe-
torical communication far less. As Miller (1989) notes, what underlies
all forms of rhetoric “is the function of deliberation, which is made
possible and useful by uncertainty” (p. 43). The rhetor must consider
what Consigny (1974, p. 177) calls the “situational incoherencies”
around a particular issue in an audience’s mind and then seek to reduce
them using appropriate resonant techniques. Yet, in the case of Lusch
and Vargo (2014) we could argue that there is an increase in situational
incoherence, at least in terms of the premise-axiom-necessary concept
relationship. Now, although generally rhetoric seeks to reduce uncer-
tainty, there are times when the production of uncertainty might be
useful from a broader strategic perspective. The presentation of the FPs
and the introduction of the axioms in Lusch and Vaergo (2014) can be
interpreted as a way of de-emphasising, even deconstructing the previ-
ous structure of S-D logic that had provided the scaffolding for the
framework since the 2004 foundational paper. The revising process of

lexical substitutions, additions, and reframings can only go so far before
the suspicion arises that it would be better to start the structuring over
again. Yet, to suddenly throw away the FPs entirely could undermine the
whole S-D logic project, opening it up to accusations of being built on
shifting assumptions and weak, contingent scaffolding. How can one
maintain the momentum of S-D logic development, protect its nascent
re-ordering from destructive criticism, and stave-off scholarly disillusion
with a framework that might be seen as evolving too far away from its
original ‘foundational premises’? Faced with such a situation, a tempo-
rary period of increased situational incoherence where all components
(premises, concepts, axioms) seems to be interrelated with each other
and at the same time both generative and derivative, might be a sensible
strategy. Certainly, when one steps back and looks at the course of the
discourse around the FPs and notes their comparative elision in the fifth
revision emerging from Vargo et al. (2020) one can see the seeds of the
final pruning of everything down to a 5 axiom core. A period of confus-
ing co-existence followed by a more radical condensing can serve to give
the dynamic of a framework in flux journeying towards a stable, emer-
gent new form. This does echo some of the key tropes of the S-D logic
narrative as we have been seeing over this and the past chapter.
The fourth revision occurs two years later and is, like the 2014 primer,
once more not surrounded by the sort of engaged, supportive commen-
tary that had accompanied the first three presentations of the FPs. The
venue is the same as the second revisions, though—the Journal of the
Academy of Marketing Science—and it is noticeable that the issue (1 of
volume 44) is the first under a new editor (Robert Palmatier). The title of
the 2016 revision is also noticeably low-key, “Institutions and Axioms:
An Extension and Update of Service-Dominant Logic”—suggesting
something along the lines of the authors offering a quick check-in with
the JAMS readership to keep them apprised of how things are develop-
ing. However, this fourth revision (Vargo & Lusch, 2016) is arguably the
most fundamental in terms of re-framing and restructuring, in that it is
here that the actor-to-actor (A2A) orientation (that had been brewing for
a few years in conference presentations and papers) is finally instantiated
152 C. Miles
into the FPs/axioms and we are also provided with an entirely new
axiom/FP.
The change of kairotic strategy for the third and fourth revisions could
be seen as an attempt to focus readership attention entirely on the sub-
stantial changes introduced in the 2014 book and 2016 paper. In this
sense the 2016 ‘update’ is given the framing of a self-sufficient communi-
cation of status from ‘headquarters’ rather than as part of a dialogical
network of emerging exchanges around certain concepts important for
S-D logic. Nevertheless, the narrative within the 2016 paper continues
the tradition of responding to misunderstandings by other scholars and
seeking to rectify issues of ambiguity around phrasing and the lexicon, a
tradition that had been somewhat interrupted for the 2014 S-D logic
primer (notwithstanding the apparent strategic generation of ambiguity
present in that work). There is evidence of an impatience or frustration
with some of these continuing issues, though. We read, for example, that
“if some prefer to argue that ‘value is always co-facilitated’ rather than
‘co-created’ we see it as an inconsequential, semantic exercise and con-
sider there to be many important, scholarly issues more worthy of debate”
(Vargo & Lusch, 2016, p. 10). This dismissal is, perhaps, justified, but it
is an interesting one in a paper that spends so much of its time revising
semantics (the substitution of ‘actors’ and ‘beneficiaries’ for enterprise
and customer, for example) and picking at the never-quite-healed scab of
‘co-production’ and ‘co-creation’. For sure, Vargo and Lusch spend much
effort to convince us of just why their lexical and semantic choices are
appropriate and their revisions developmental and constructive rather
than regressive and confusing—but there is a strong sense of a hierarchy
regarding what aspects of the lexicon we should be concerned with and
what should just be passed over.
The abstract to Vargo and Lusch (2016) speaks of recognising “the
need for a crisper and more precise delineation of the foundational prem-
ises and specification of the axioms of S-D logic” (p. 5). This is combined
with a realisation that the FPs/Axioms are limited by “the absence of a
clearly articulated specification of the mechanisms of (often massive-
scale) coordination and cooperation involved in the cocreation of value
through markets and, more broadly, in society” (ibid.). The answer to
both of these problems comes in the form of the actor-to-actor (A2A)
perspective and the natural extension of this perspective to the role of

institutions and institutional arrangements in coordinating actor co-
creation of value. Integrating the A2A perspective into the foundational
expressions of S-D logic means that “the need to further modify the lan-
guage of at least four—three of them axioms—of the FPs becomes more
glaringly apparent” (p. 7). Changes to three out of four axioms of any
conceptual system would be considered significant. Yet, Vargo and Lusch
make it clear that the changes that they have instituted are the result of
“more than a decade” of collaborative working with “countless contribut-
ing scholars from around the world and from an ever-growing array of
disciplines” (p. 5). These are not the result, in other words, of sudden,
capricious changes in direction but rather the result of a community-
centered dialogue around the evolution of the framework, building up an
ethos of scholarly openness, cooperation, and responsiveness. They also
reference the previous revisions of the premises/axioms, making it clear
that these foundational components have always been in an evolving
state, reflexive to the global discourse that V&L (2004) initiated—and so
portraying this change as consistency. Nevertheless, the new A2A/institu-
tional arrangements perspective does represent a serious change in funda-
mental approach, given the necessity for altering and adding to the FP/
axioms. The description of this, therefore, as an update is doing a lot of
rhetorical work—downplaying its significance to the fundamental con-
ceptual base, depicting it as just one in a series of ‘business as usual’
responses to ongoing community development.
The handling of the revisions in Vargo and Lusch (2016) is also marked
by the notable ‘settling in’ of a metaphor that had been slowly emerging
in their previous work, namely, the idea of ‘zooming in’ and 'zooming
out’ with a conceptual lens. The phrasing first seems to be explicitly
adopted in Vargo and Lusch (2011a), where the authors note how they
had previously (in Vargo & Lusch 2008b) “used a ‘linguistic telescope’ to
zoom out to a broader, more transcending view of economic exchange
and suggested ‘It’s all B2B’” (2011a, p. 181)—although this phrasing is
not to be found in the 2008b text at all. Indeed, one might point to
Lusch’s (2006) paper on “The small and long view” in marketing as being
the forerunner for the zooming in/zooming out metaphor in S-D logic.
There, Lusch notes that the service-dominant approach “embraces a small
154 C. Miles
and long view”; the former because “S-D logic focuses on fundamental
building blocks or the development of specialized competences that result
in the division of labor”, and the latter because “it views all economies
(hunter-gatherer, agricultural, industrial, information) as having a com-
mon foundation” (p. 241). Lusch’s claim is directly referenced in a later
paper written with Frederick Webster (Webster & Lusch, 2013), where it
is explicitly tied to a telescope metaphor; “a new conceptual lens is needed
that creates an ability to telescope out to view, think and act on large
marketing systems as they would unfold over long time periods” (p. 391).
However, as already noted, Vargo and Lusch had used the slightly differ-
ent “linguistic telescope” formulation by 2011 to describe the A2A’s gen-
eralising, meta-perspective. In other words, the telescope metaphor (and
its adjunct, the ‘variable zoom’) acts to anchor (in a familiar, solidly engi-
neered, utilitarian manner) a sense that S-D logic can provide the scholar
and practitioner with the antidote to fixed-perspective myopia. By the
time of Vargo and Lusch (2016) the use of the metaphor has become well
established and we find “zooming out” being used to describe both the
more holistic consideration of value creation that the A2A perspective
affords but also the revelation of new structural details not perceivable
with the earlier micro-level lens, in particular the features of institutions
and institutional arrangements. Indeed, the “process of zooming out to a
broader perspective on value cocreation” (Vargo & Lusch, 2016, p. 7) is
used here to characterise much of the revision work undertaken since
V&L (2004). As the authors note, “since Vargo and Lusch (2004), we
have increasingly encouraged zooming out to wider perspective than
‘firm’–‘customer’ exchange” and they then advise us that “this zooming
out has resulted in a major turn toward a systems orientation” (p. 10).
The ability of the S-D logic framework to aid in (and encourage) the
switching of focal length from the micro through to the macro consider-
ation of marketing systems becomes a central component in its evolving
value proposition. As we will see in Chap. 6 the gradual (re)engagement
by Vargo and Lusch with the systems perspective leads to some significant
changes of emphasis and lexicon that allows S-D logic to focus on its abil-
ity to transcend tensions, contradictions and paradoxes within, and
across, levels of analysis.
As already noted, the Vargo and Lusch (2016) presentation of the

fourth set of revisions to the FPs is the final ‘formal’ (i.e. announced)
presentations of revisions at the time of writing. However, it should be
noted that the first chapter in The SAGE Handbook of Service Dominant
Logic sets out “the core concepts of S-D logic” (Lusch & Vargo, 2019,
p. 7) and can be seen as a consolidation of the fourth revision. The FP/
axiom structure in Lusch and Vargo (2019) is not changed from Vargo
and Lusch (2016). However, there is a significant change to what might
be termed the conceptual ‘preamble’ to the FPs/axioms. Lusch and Vargo
(2014) introduced the idea of “necessary concepts” that informed the
“service-dominant mindset” (p. xxiii) and that were used as stepping
stones towards the FPs/axioms. In Vargo and Lusch (2016) they were
shifted into an assemblage termed “the narrative and process of S-D
logic” (p. 7). In Lusch and Vargo (2019) these become further trans-
formed into “five foundational concepts”: “actors, service, resources,
value and institutions” (p. 7). This is a more svelte approach than we find
in Lusch and Vargo (2014), but the ambiguity around the distinction
between foundational concepts, foundational premises, and “core” foun-
dational premises “given the status of axioms” (p. 8) still lingers.
Finally, as indicated in Table 4.6, Vargo et al. (2020) present the foun-
dations of S-D logic without any recourse to the framework of the
Foundational Premises. They state that “the focus of S-D logic to date has
been to build its metatheoretical framework” and that “this framework is
captured in 5 axioms” (p. 9). Throughout the whole piece there is not one
single mention of the foundational premises (nor, indeed, of the ‘five
foundational concepts’ introduced in Lusch & Vargo, 2019). The five
Table 4.6 FPs 5th revision (Vargo et al., 2020)

Axiom 1 Service is the fundamental basis of exchange
Axiom 2 Value is co-created by multiple actors, always including the
beneficiary
Axiom 3 All social and economic actors are resource integrators
Axiom 4 Value is always uniquely and phenomenologically determined by the
beneficiary
Axiom 5 Value co-creation is coordinated through actor-generated institutions
and institutional arrangements
156 C. Miles
axioms presented in Vargo and Lusch (2016) now exist on their own
without any supporting scaffolding, as it were.
The Rhetorical Status of the Changing FPs and Axioms
The process that I explore above seems to depict the slow burial of the
Foundational Premises. This burial is accomplished through an interim
strategy of destabilisation that is largely resolved in Vargo et al. (2020).
What is the rhetorical advantage to the overall development of S-D logic
in this form of erasure? In many ways we can see this whole process as a
form of counter-rhetoric directed at the original 2004 paper. For S-D
logic to move forward it needed to be freed from the structure and claims
that worked for initial promotion but that became too much of a liability
as the framework developed. In addition, significant new elements needed
to be introduced into that framework (the agent to agent and service
ecosystem concepts, for example) and perhaps the FPs began to represent
more of a burden to continually maintain and alter than a promotional
advantage. Constantly adding to the FPs would not be an efficient solu-
tion. Simplification makes a lot more sense and progressive stages of this
simplification (first the introduction of the axioms, then their fore-
grounding, and then the final burial of the FPs) allow a gradual, less
dramatic, restructuring. One might also note that the sorts of destabilis-
ing confusion that occur in the mid phase of this development could
actually work rhetorically to lay the ground for the minimising of ele-
ments down to the five axioms, highlighting the need for simplification
amongst supporters and readers.
The continual development of the FPs, including the final phase of FP
erasure, can also be seen as a positive sign, amplifying the ethos of the
founders. There is nothing sadder in software development than seeing
an open source project languish with no updates and no interest from its
developers in responding to comments and bug reports. A healthy open
source project is marked by communicative developers who respond to
user feedback, push regular updates, and so clearly have a vision for the
future of the product (well, ‘software as a service’, let’s say). Updates (revi-
sions, in the language of S-D logic) reflect well on Vargo and Lusch as
co-founders, and speak well for the health, and therefore future, of the
whole project. Change is a sign of life, in other words.
Change is important in marketing theory development—the presenta-
tion of a framework that is ‘complete’ and resistant to radical develop-
ment and re-framing means that the ongoing life of the framework
depends entirely on the original paper that presents it. Authors can walk
the theory out in a monograph or possibly an edited collection, but its
relevance, its power, is frozen in time, becoming more and more a histori-
cal feature rather than a vibrant, evolving discourse (even in a discipline
such as marketing that affords more than normal respect to its aged
frameworks). In this sense, Vargo and Lusch (2004) is both a valuable
promotional force, still working for S-D logic all these years after its pub-
lication as it citations attest, but it is also an existential threat. If its sta-
tus as foundational document means that it is always the first piece of
writing that a new researcher is pointed to (by a colleague, by a supervisor
or mentor, or by a search engine) when they look for explication regard-
ing this ‘Service-Dominant logic’ that they have just heard of, then they
will start off their journey with a very much different conception than
they would have if they had been directed to say Lusch and Vargo’s (2014)
monograph or early chapters in the 2019 Handbook. Frameworks (and
mind-sets, and theories) need to evolve if they are to respond to their
audiences. Emergence is, after all, a dynamic feature of the argument
that Vargo and Lusch (2004) lay before us regarding the new dominant
logic—its elements can be seen to be coming together as the result of a
large amount of disparate research. Similarly, within the discourse of S-D
logic, various changes and themes emerge over time, necessitating shifts
in (and clarifications of, as well as additions to) the lexicon, changes in
emphasis of the FPs, and even the entire restructuring of those FPs.
The dynamic of evolution and emergence is part of the rhetorical argu-
mentation of S-D logic from its inception, then. Yet, the success of Vargo
and Lusch (2004) can threaten the part that such a dynamic can play in
the future reception and interpretation of S-D logic itself, if the founda-
tional paper becomes an overbearing monolith. This is one of the issues
that have been highlighted in occasional public debates (in the pages of
academic journals) with scholars who have chosen to critique Vargo and
Lusch on the basis of familiarity with only very early work in the S-D
158 C. Miles
logic canon. A case in point is the exchange initiated by O’Shaughnessy

and O’Shaughnessy (2009) in the pages of the European Journal of
Marketing, with an article that argues that S-D logic is “neither logically
sound nor a perspective to displace others in marketing” (p. 784) and
that its “promotion as the single best perspective for marketing is regres-
sive” (p. 785). However, in order to prove their point, O’Shaughnessy
and O’Shaughnessy (2009) largely focus in on a conceptual analysis of
Vargo and Lusch (2004). At the point of publication, then, S-D logic has
seen a good five years of the sort of development that we have been exam-
ining in this chapter and many of the accusations that O’Shaughnessy
and O’Shaughnessy (2009) make against the logic ignore the evolution of
their lexicon (and associated conceptual nuance), the FPs, and the large
amount of further explication that the co-founders have provided in
print over that five years. Accordingly, in Lusch and Vargo (2011), the
co-founders of S-D logic argue that the O’Shaughnessys “fail to review,
much less incorporate the large literature on S-D logic, much of which
deals with specific points raised in their critique” and explain that “it is
this complete disregard for the extensive follow-on work, not just by us
but also by a large community of participating scholars, which motivates
this reply, more than the critical nature of the analysis itself ” (p. 1300).
The “rejoinder” to this, provided in O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy
(2011) doubles down on the conceptual significance of the foundational
paper, claiming that “as their paper was the foundational thesis, there was
no advantage in reading supplementary papers if they shared such a con-
testable base”, and that while they “did not read all the literature on the
S-D logic, […] the issue is the soundness of the central premise on which
this literary corpus rests” (p. 1310). Vargo and Lusch’s (2011b) exasper-
ated “rejoinder to a rejoinder” repeats the substance of their previous
defence. After summarising the large amount of citations, further papers,
conferences, presentations and special issues that have engaged with S-D
logic since the publication in 2004 of the foundational paper, they point
out that the O’Shaughnessys “dismiss all of this work, while acknowledg-
ing, as we (Lusch & Vargo, 2011) suggested, that they have never actually
read any of it, except (apparently quite cursorily) one article (Vargo &
Lusch, 2004) that we wrote about seven years ago”, and ask “is there
really any need to comment much further?” (Vargo & Lusch, 2011b,
p. 1319).
The issue here concerns the nature of a foundational paper for a con-
ceptual framework (or mindset, or paradigm, or theory, or pre-theory).
Should a paper like Vargo and Lusch (2004) hold up to scrutiny despite
the many years of additional work done to evolve and adapt it? Does it
make sense to suggest, as O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy (2009,
2011) do, that if there are errors in the foundational paper it makes no
sense to consider later work because it will already be built on shaky
foundations? Of course, it depends on how seriously one takes the use of
the word ‘logic’. I have suggested that Vargo and Lusch use terms such as
“logic” and “premise” and “axiom” rhetorically, to borrow the ethos of
mathematico-scientific rigour. If one was to take them at their word and
ignore the rhetorical artifice, then, of course, one might make a case that
if a logic is flawed from the start then instead of fixing it bit by bit, prem-
ise by premise, one should just start it again and call it something else—
or perhaps take another leaf from software design and call it S-D logic
2.0. But one cannot ignore the rhetoric, of course. And one cannot ignore
the dynamic of evolution and emergence (and, indeed, transcendence)
that is at the heart of the argument in Vargo and Lusch (2004). The
changing FPs and the manner in which they evolve into the Axioms are
rhetorical instantiations of that evolution and emergence. The Axioms
literally emerge over time from the FPs. They are a transcending hierar-
chical level of the S-D logic system and so work to inductively demon-
strate the way in which understanding of the service-dominant nature of
exchange evolves.
There is, of course, a degree of tension between the mathematical-
philosophical metaphors of “logic”, “premise” and “axiom” with which
the structure of Vargo and Lusch’s project is built and the biological
nature of concepts such as “evolution” and “emergence” (or indeed the
more metaphysical “transcendence”). Some of that tension is resolved by
the integration of a systems perspective into S-D logic that we will exam-
ine in Chap. 6, but some of it inevitably is not. Can one change founda-
tional premises, without undercutting their status as foundational? Can
one change the status of a foundational premise to axiomatic without,
again, undercutting the status of foundational for those premises that
160 C. Miles
have not been made axiomatic? While Vargo and Lusch have been admi-
rably explicit regarding the need to consider carefully the lexicon of S-D
logic, we cannot ignore that “logic”, “foundational premise”, and “axiom”
are part of that lexicon. While these words have rhetorical connotations
that are powerful for an audience that respects the tradition of empirical
investigation in mathematics, logic and the hard sciences, they conceptu-
ally bleed over into softer, more biological or social science forms of intel-
lectual investigation in a difficult way, implying a rigidity and certainty
that works against the flexibility and adaptability that Vargo and Lusch’s
evolving construction of the service-dominant perspective requires. In
other words, rhetorical strategies that can be effective at one time might
not work as well, or might present a more problematic potential, at other
times. Over such a long discourse stream, kairos becomes a difficult thing
to manage with equal effectiveness at all times. Within Vargo and Lusch
(2004), the lexical choices of “foundational premise”, “logic” and “para-
digm” can work with rhetorical flare—but their legacy across decades can
sometimes act as a burden to the evolution of the service-dominant per-
spective and the emergence of new thinking (or at least the presentation
of that thinking within the terms of those original lexical choices). The
move from FPs to a smaller number of “axioms” is a sensible way to try
to manage one part of this burden as was the rather quick abandonment
of the “paradigm” concept from further S-D logic development. Such
changes certainly demonstrate Vargo and Lusch’s engagement with the
rhetorical kairos of an evolving research stream, and the gradual, consis-
tent nature of those changes have also discursively embodied the dynamic
of emergence, evolution, and transcendence that has been a core feature
of S-D logic’s value proposition across its development (something I will
pick up again at the end of Chap. 6).
The regular changes to the lexicon and FPs of S-D logic that we have
been looking at above are not only framed within metaphors of evolu-
tion, emergence, and transcendence. One of the earliest rhetorical strate-
gies that Vargo and Lusch employed in order to manage the presentation
of change in the evolving logic was to adopt the metaphor of Open
Source development and it is to this that I now turn.
The Rhetoric of Open Source

In Vargo and Lusch (2006), the authors state that “S-D logic is still evolv-
ing and in ‘open-source’ development” (p. 51), adding later in the edited
collection that “only an open-source, collaborative effort can ‘get right’ a
fully developed theoretical framework that can serve the long-term needs
of the discipline” (Lusch & Vargo, 2006c, p. xvii). they also use the phrase
again in their short introduction to the section of the edited collection
dealing with alternative logics, using the phrase four times in the short
piece, demonstrating their hope that “others will participate in the open-
source development of S-D logic” (Lusch & Vargo, 2006a, p. 243). It is
significant that the phrase is also used in Gummesson’s (2006) essay on
“Many-to-Many Marketing as Grand Theory” in the same edited collec-
tion, where he glosses its use in the following manner: “to use Internet
lingo, it is like the Linux operating system: It has an open source code”,
meaning that “anyone is welcome to contribute with constructive
improvements or alternatives, but destructive criticism is not encour-
aged” (p. 340). Of course, here, Gummesson is not referring to S-D logic,
but his own “tentative contribution to grand theory” (ibid.), many-to-
many marketing, that he is presenting as an alternative to S-D logic.
Towards the end of his contribution he returns to the “spirit of the open
source code of Linux”, describing how the “originator” of Linux, Linus
Torvalds, “conceived the beginnings of a new operating system and,
rather than protect it, asked others to help develop it” (p. 352). In this
way, the Linux operating system “elicited the brainpower of committed
hackers and rapidly grew into the most advanced operating system”
(ibid.). Finally, Gummesson notes that “anyone can use it for free and
suggest changes”, “but its originator has remained the network captain”
(ibid.). Now, I’ve been running Linux systems for the best part of twenty
years and I do not remember Torvalds ever being described as the “net-
work captain”, whatever that quaint term might mean. However, Torvalds
has been described as the Linux kernel’s “Benevolent Dictator for Life” or
BDFL (Laffan, 2012; Schneider, 2022). The “benevolent dictator” model
is common in open source development communities “where decisions
regarding disputes are made by one person” (Laffan, 2012, p. 18)—and
162 C. Miles
BDFLs have existed for the programming languages, Python, Perl, and
Ruby, the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as for the Linux kernel,
amongst a number of other open source projects.
Schneider (2022) points to the software, known as Git, that Torvalds
wrote in order to manage the open source contributions to the Linux
kernel as “designed to enable distributed software development, with
multiple developers working on their particular modified version of the
code base”, meaning that “no one version was canonical” because “Git
itself provides for no mechanism for governance” (p. 1971). However,
because one code base does have to be chosen as canonical in order for there
to be an actual release, the software “leaves a power vacuum” that is filled
by Torvalds’ role as BDFL—“he decides which version is canonical and
which community contributions it includes” (ibid.). Schneider (2022)
describes both Git and the email lists that are often adjuncts to open
source development projects, as embodying an “implicit feudalism”
(p. 1972) and I think that this is worth thinking about for a while in
relationship to Vargo and Lusch’s adoption of the metaphor of open
source to describe S-D logic development. Because it is a metaphor—the
Linux kernel is not the same thing as a grand theory of marketing.
Marketing scholarship occurs predominantly via academic journals, and
to a lesser extent via academic conferences that then feed into papers for
those journals or, perhaps, edited collections. The marketing journal peer
review process does not use Git or any system forked from it—it is con-
ceptually not a transparent, open system (for good reason a lot of the
time). The same thing can be said for the marketing conference paper
selection process. Open source software development and academic the-
ory development are simply not the same domain (this is a point made
well by Williams, 2012). Bringing the terms from open source to the
domain of scholarly work in marketing academia is therefore a meta-
phorical strategy with a rhetorical intent. The meaning of the metaphor
is to amplify the statement that S-D logic is open to contributions—it is
not the purview of Vargo and Lusch only—they are happy to have col-
laborators and to see others working on the FPs and axioms and contrib-
uting to the development of the logic. The phrase ‘open source’ has
connotations of libre software politics, flat organisational structure, and a
welcoming community of developers. And those are the connotations

that Vargo and Lusch would be keen to get across in their promotion of
the developer model they have chosen for S-D logic. They probably
would not want the connotations of feudalism and dictatorship (though
benevolent) that can also be seen as part of the open source model, which
has had its fair share of issues around political and personal abuses of
power (see, again, Schneider, 2022).
Vargo and Lusch have continued to use the open source metaphor as a
rhetorical tool for amplifying the message that S-D logic is developed in
the spirit of inclusive and collaborative research. It is clearly a metaphor
that they feel works effectively. In Vargo and Lusch (2008a), they write
that “we have always claimed that we do not ‘own’ S-D logic but rather it
is more of an open-source evolution that we tried to identify, punctuate,
and advance in our initial article and then elaborate and refine through
subsequent work, while encouraging other scholars to do the same”
(p. 1). In Lusch and Vargo (2011), this is repeated once more—“in our
writings and presentations we have argued from the beginning that we do
not own S-D logic; we view it as open-source” (p. 1304). And Vargo
(2019) states in the closing of the final chapter in the Handbook that
“much of the success of S-D logic to date is that, in line with its central
mantra of ‘cocreation’, it has always been considered open-source”, add-
ing “it will continue to be so, and all interested parties are warmly wel-
comed” (p. 735). Coming at the end of a mammoth book with a large
number of contributors, this statement packs a strong dose of pathos as
well as ethos. The consistency with which the open source metaphor has
been repeated across the discourse of the logic’s benevolent dictators is, of
course, part of the rhetorical strategy that gives energy to its persuasive
effect. The fact that the evolution of the FPs has been presented to the
marketing audience in papers that are authored by Vargo and Lusch
somewhat undercuts the strict open-source logic. They are the voices of
canonical development. This does make them similar in some respects to
Torvalds in his position as benevolent dictator for the Linux kernel, but,
as already stated, there is a big difference between the management of a
Git repository and the development of S-D logic (or any other marketing
theory). As we shall see in Chap. 6, the collaborative dynamics around
164 C. Miles
the integration of the systems perspective into S-D logic are somewhat
more complex and nuanced than the open-source metaphor would sug-
gest. But, then, that is one of the rhetorical purposes of a metaphor, to
attach a vivid set of persuasive connotations to something that might
otherwise be interpreted in other, more nuanced, sometimes less favour-
able ways.
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5
A Rhetorical Analysis of sdlogic.net
The sdlogic.net domain was registered in July of 2005, a little more than
a year after the publication of the foundational Journal of Marketing
paper. This demonstrates an early recognition of the importance of the
web for the promotion and dissemination of the scholarly position that
Vargo and Lusch were setting out. The website is also significant because
it represents the ‘unfiltered’ voice of S-D logic—there are no publishers,
editors, reviewers, or other gate-keepers to worry about. The simple fact
that there is a S-D logic website, then, is a rhetorical issue. It is not usual
for scholarly marketing or management theories to have websites devoted
to them. Shelby Hunt’s Resource-Advantage Theory, for example, does
not have a website. Prahalad and Ramaswamy’s DART model does not
have a website. Michael Porter’s 5 Forces framework does not have a web-
site. Evert Gummesson’s Total Relationship Marketing does not have a
website. Philip Kotler has had a website since 2012 (pkotler.org—title,
‘The Father of Modern Marketing’) but it is very much a website devoted
to the many ideas of one man (and so concerned with personal branding
rather than the promotion of one particular theoretical mind-set). That
Vargo and Lusch had the foresight to establish a controlled platform for
the dissemination of S-D logic perspectives, news, and material indicates
how conscious they have been regarding the need to manage what Potter
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46510-9_5
170 C. Miles
(2005, p. 108) would call the “antagonistic relationship between ver-

sions”, providing a description that can rhetorically counter alternative
descriptions and also “resist being countered” itself. A consideration of
how sdlogic.net goes about constructing this description is essential to
the rhetorical analysis of the larger S-D logic project.
The dynamic nature of the web introduces an interesting challenge.
The discourse around S-D logic that is published in traditional scholarly
outlets allows us to see how the ideas it argues for change over time. We
can trace the development of the foundational premises, the introduction
of the axioms, the changing emphases and supporting metaphors and
vocabularies through a careful chronological investigation of the books,
conference papers, and articles that are in the public domain. The dis-
course stream that is represented by the website artefact is rather more
difficult to discern—the ‘live website’ exists right now, as I look at it with
my web browser, but the site could have changed significantly over the
last twenty-four hours and, of course, it might equally change tomorrow.
Web pages and web sites are designed to be interactive and easy to
author—this affords them a degree of dynamism that few other discourse
artefacts share. However, the changes that a website undergoes are rarely
made a matter of record—they are unannounced, silent edits and addi-
tions that can represent as little as a correction of a one-word typo or as
much as an entire site redesign. From the perspective of rhetorical analy-
sis, all these factors make the website an alluring yet highly unstable
prospect.
The sdlogic.net site has been archived by the Internet Archive (archive.
org/web) at various points since its inception. This means that we do have
a version of the home page from late 2005 and a series of later archived
versions. However, as Brugger (2009) has convincingly argued, “an
archived website is always an actively created subjective reconstruction”
(p. 125) and is “almost always deficient” (p. 126). Indeed, we can see
exactly why when we try to explore the archived sdlogic.net site from
2005; we find that the home page is the only page on the site actually
archived, the others not having been collected (although some of the
‘news flash’ links do point to archived pages, such as the announcement
for the Otago Forum meeting due to occur in November 2005, as well as
the links to both Vargo and Lusch’s respective university homepages). We
5 A Rhetorical Analysis of sdlogic.net 171
need to be very careful, then, in how we use an archived version of any

website, and of the evidential weight that we ask them to bear. However,
even if I determine to only use the ‘live website’ in this chapter’s analysis
I am inevitably bound by the fact that by the time this book reaches pub-
lication, the sdlogic.net that I am talking about here might be substan-
tially, substantively, different from what a reader would find when visiting
the site.
The following rhetorical analysis of sdlogic.net, then, comes with the
large proviso that I am focusing on the site as it exists at the time of writ-
ing, June through August of 2022. I will try to include as much descrip-
tive, orienting information as I can when discussing the features of the
site so that a reader might have some chance of imaginatively recreating
them if faced with their material absence. In editing the final proofs of
the book in 2023 I have indeed noticed that there has been a reasonably
significant redesign of sdlogic.net. While many of the elements that I
discuss below still exist, there are some changes to the presentation of
content (such as the Foundational Premises being replaced entirely by the
Axioms on the Foundations page) that are rhetorically important but I do
not have the opportunity to address. Once more, then, the analysis below
reflects a snaphot of the state of sdlogic.net in mid-to-late 2022 (the
pages of which can be easily accessed using the Internet Archive).
I will first discuss the rhetorical ramifications of the structure of the
site—those ways that information has been parcelled, connected, and
sectioned in order to aid the persuasiveness of a particular interpretation
or position. I shall then move on to an exploration of the site’s visual
rhetoric—how elements such as tables, graphics, and imagery contribute
to the rhetorical effect of the site. This will then allow us to examine more
broadly the manner in which the site is used to establish ethos, or credibil-
ity, for S-D logic and also how the interactive and networked nature of
the web is recruited to take advantage of kairos, or the improvisational,
just-in-time aspect of rhetoric. I will then turn to the part played by
pathos, and consider how emotions as well as rational, logical argumenta-
tion are recruited in the online persuasive enterprise. Finally, I will con-
sider the general use of stylistic devices on sdlogic.net, and how this
relates to the use of stylistic devices in the larger S-D logic rhetori-
cal corpus.
172 C. Miles
Structure of the Site

Sdlogic.net has a ‘reactive’ design in so far as it presents a different visual
layout if you are visiting it on a mobile device or not. Indeed, the only
cookies that it drops into your browser are used to record if you are view-
ing the site on a mobile device or not so that it can serve the appropriate
layout (along with a cookie to track whether you have accepted the
GDPR cookie alert). A quick inspection of the source code of the homep-
age reveals call-outs to Weebly.com, a website hosting and building ser-
vice founded in 2006 and now owned by Blocks Inc., and to editmysite.
com, which is a URL used by Weebly’s drag-and-drop website editor to
manage resources. There is a note in the footer of each page on the site
indicating that sdlogic.net is hosted by StartLogic, and this company pro-
vided the Weebly site builder to their hosting customers until 2020
(StartLogic, 2022). Sites built using Weebly have mobile versions built
automatically, so the presence of a mobile version of sdlogic.net does not
mean that the authors/creators of the site have specifically focused on
making one available. These types of design and functionality automa-
tions and default provisions, that are common across web hosting plat-
forms and web site building software, do make consideration of rhetorical
intent difficult. Suffice it to say that the availability of a mobile version
means that accessing and processing the content of the site does become
easier on a mobile device and this inevitably aids transmission of the S-D
logic outside of an office scenario. It also means that the site meets the
expectations of mobile users (it looks ‘made for mobile’ in terms of its
menus, page orientation and text size)—something that is important as
‘digital native’ university students and young marketing and manage-
ment professionals become more significant as target audiences for S-D
logic discourse. Conforming to the design and navigation expectations of
visitors is an important tool in establishing credibility. Bellman and
Rossiter (2004) call these expectations the ‘website schema’ and note that
“congruence between a consumer’s website schema and the actual struc-
ture of a particular site is associated with the site being rated easier to
navigate, a more favorable attitude toward brands advertised on the site,
and higher quality brand decisions” (p. 1). From a structural perspective
the bimodal mobile/desktop layout has the most impact upon the navi-
gation menu system on the site. On the non-mobile version the menus
are stacked horizontally across the page in two lines (there are 11 menu
headings altogether) while on mobile the menus are hidden behind an
icon familiar to mobile browser users, the three-line ‘hamburger’ that,
when activated, opens the menu list as a vertical stack on the left hand
side of the page. The existence of a mobile version of the site ensures that
it can be consumed efficiently in that format, but also gives the impres-
sion that the site creators (and therefore the S-D logic brand) have gone
to the trouble of making the site conform to mobile device user
expectations.
As we would expect, the actual menu items are identical across the
mobile and desktop versions. The menu titles are Home, Foundations, In
Memoriam, Announcements (which has links to two sub-pages: FMM,
and Naples Forum), Handbook of S-D logic, Presentations, Publications,
Multimedia, Awards and Recognitions, Contact Us, and Classroom
Material. This is quite a large number of items for the menu—indicated
by the fact that the desktop version of the layout requires an aesthetically
awkward stacked two rows of menu items. However, while it might be
unappealing from the perspective of modern web design due to its
crowded appearance, from a rhetorical perspective it speaks of abun-
dance—an abundance of information and possibilities. Someone who
first visits the website in search of knowledge about S-D logic is therefore
greeted by a large number of affordances that promise a wealth of oppor-
tunities. Menu items such as ‘Classroom Material’, ‘Foundations’, and
‘Presentations’ speak of a clear willingness to provide useful help for the
seeker. This, then, is not a website operating simply as an online ‘place-
holder’ for the S-D logic brand, a claim stake designed to prevent others
from muscling in on the territory. Instead, it announces itself as a rich
central resource for those interested in learning and joining the commu-
nity. The over-flowing menu bar thus might score dirty looks from pro-
fessional web designers but provides an important rhetorical orientation
that is far more valuable.
If you visit the site without an ad blocker active on your browser, you
will also encounter Amazon ads for various S-D logic titles on three of the
site’s pages (Home, Foundations, and Presentations). In all cases the ads
174 C. Miles
take the form of a small vertical column of three advertisements for S-D
logic books authored or edited by Vargo and Lusch. They are stacked
vertically under an image of the cover of the SAGE Handbook of Service-
Dominant Logic, which itself functions as link to that book on Amazon.
com, although is not an actual hosted advertisement block (which means
that it still appears even if you have an active ad blocker). The site is
clearly promoting the SAGE Handbook as the ‘latest word’ in published
S-D logic discourse, and this is made even more clear by the fact that it
has a page (and therefore a menu item) on the site all to its own. The ads,
when they are visible, are not just functioning as ads—they amplify the
ethos of the logic itself—both through the ad numerum fallacy (there are
lots of books on S-D logic so it must be important) as well as persuasively
leveraging the authority and legitimacy of Amazon.com (remembering
that the ‘look and feel’ of Amazon ads will be a familiar element of many
website schemas for most viewers). The visual link to the SAGE Handbook
performs a similar function, leveraging the brand legitimacy of SAGE as
an academic publisher and, indeed, the connotations of an established,
complex knowledge base that the display of the ‘Handbook’ title confers.
A further structural element that is present across all pages on the site
is the banner header that runs underneath the navigation menu. This
consists of a rectangle with a white background, on which are the all-caps
title (in dark navy blue) ‘Service-Dominant Logic’, the subtitle (rendered
in a light green) “Service is the Basis of Exchange”, and, on the right of
both these elements, an image of a circular graphic. This graphic will be
familiar to readers of Lusch and Vargo’s (2014) book, Service-Dominant
Logic: Premises, Perspectives, Possibilities, where it appears on the cover,
under the subtitle, and where its significance is explained in a note on the
back cover. The absence of an equivalent note on the web site is notewor-
thy and we shall deal in detail with the image and its significance in the
section below on visual rhetoric. The sub-header in the banner is also
significant. It serves as the slogan of the S-D logic brand, at least as it is
presented on the website, and its repetition across the pages works as an
emphasising epanaphora, continually reminding the reader of the essence
of the S-D logic proposition. It has all the marks of an artfully con-
structed slogan—it is short, uses short words (none more than two syl-
lables), and has a single impactful focus. If we contrast it with, say, the
initial statement of the common purpose of all actors to be found in

Lusch and Vargo (2014), “value cocreation through resource integration
and service-for-service exchange” (p. 10), we can see that the website
slogan highlights only one of the three elements contained in the 2014
formulation. Furthermore, the website slogan emphasises the fundamen-
tal nature of service in exchange, it does not leave room for any other type
of exchange, rather asserting that exchange is at its root about service
exchange. It provides an easy to remember summary of what the core
message of the S-D logic position is. In many ways, we can say that it acts
as a needed antidote to the complex, shifting, variegated nature of the
S-D logic axioms, premises, and concepts. It is, of course, a version of
FP1, with the slightly redundant ‘fundamental’ excised and this helps us
realise that all of the other foundational premises flow from the initial
assertion. It is able to function well as a slogan for the S-D logic brand
because it enshrines a statement regarding the hierarchy of the concept-
building in the logic. Once you understand that service is the basis of
exchange, all else will follow logically.
Visual Rhetoric
The website has a number of obvious visual components, including its
overall visual design choices (colour use, etc.), images used across the dif-
ferent pages, video components, as well as the tabular presentation of
data. The first component that I shall examine is the use of the Maori
koru symbol, already mentioned above.
Maori Koru Symbol
Every page on the site bears the repeated image of a jade koru, a spiral
figure that “serves as the central design feature of a number of modes of
traditional Maori artistic practice” (Shand, 2002, p. 48). The choice of a
koru as the visual emblem (perhaps, the brand logo) of S-D logic is an
interesting one, rhetorically. The image is rather left to fend for itself (or
for its interpretation) on the website but is explicitly expounded upon in
176 C. Miles
a note on the back cover of Lusch and Vargo (2014) where it is explained
that the cover image is of “a contemporary sculpture of the Maori Koru
symbol, based on an unfurling fern frond, which has connotations of
new life, awakening of ideas, and harmony”. It has “been chosen by the
authors as a representation of S-D logic” and the particular sculpture seen
in the image is made of jade “from the South Island of New Zealand—
the location of the first conference on S-D logic, The Otago Forum”. The
intended denotative and connotative significations of the koru are there-
fore made explicit and connected both to the historical development of
S-D logic and to its substantive values. It is worth noting that the koru
has a significant history of being adopted as a symbol by various govern-
ment and commercial organisations in New Zealand (Mead, 1996;
Shand, 2002) and its use in this context has been described as forming
the “basis of a nationalistic graphic enterprise”, forging “a sense of design
that was unique to place” (Shand, 2002, p. 50). The adoption of the fig-
ure by the authors of S-D logic certainly nods to the significance of the
Ortago Forum for the credible promotion of their work. But it appears to
be the wider connotations of spirality that the emblem is most valued
for here (rather than its place in Maori tradition and identity). The mean-
ings of the koru that the back cover explication on Lusch and Vargo
(2014) provides focus around the idea of gradual growth, the unfurling
of the fern as it awakes into life. The two natural phenomena that the
koru is most commonly said to denote are the fern frond and the wave
(Shand, 2002). The fern frond spirals outwards as it grows (it unfurls),
while the wave spirals inwards (eventually to collapse on itself ). Both
forms are linked, though, through their dynamic of natural evolution.
Spirality can, of course, have negative connotations (we speak of people
‘spiralling out’ or being ‘in a spiral’ to describe their descent into prob-
lematic states or experiences)—spiral vortices leading down the plughole,
creating a destructive tornado, or pulling matter into a black hole are all
familiar instances of the negative symbolism of the spiral and can serve to
illustrate the complex, multi-valent nature of spiral figures.
The explicit identification of the spiral figure on the cover of Lusch and
Vargo (2014) as a koru serves to manage and direct the symbolic inter-
pretation of readers. This is not an inward vortex rushing downwards, but
an evolving outwards spiral speaking of growth and life. This
interpretation is somewhat complicated by a further image that enjoys

prominence on the website and that is the cover image of the SAGE
Handbook of Service-Dominant Logic, which is not only visible as a pro-
motion on a number of pages but also has its own page on the site (where
the cover is reproduced as a very large graphic). The cover image for the
Handbook is also, unmistakably, a spiral and this strengthens the presence
of this figure across the website, providing a repetition of visual form that
calls attention to itself and argues for its symbolic significance. The
absence of any attempt on the website to capitalise on this, to connect the
visual with the verbal and explicitly speak to the symbolism of the spiral
for S-D logic is striking. It is left to function purely at the level of visual
rhetoric, then, for those who do not have the back cover of the 2014
book to hand. Furthermore, the fact that the 2018 SAGE Handbook does
not feature a koru but instead has a spiral of a very different kind further
complicates the rhetorical connotations. The Handbook’s cover features
what might be described as a spiral constructed from webbed filaments of
light against a very dark background. The viewer is looking from the top
of the spiral downwards (in that the perspective and tone values imply
that the we are looking at a figure receding into the distance). The impres-
sion is most definitely not of ascent, but rather of descent.
The juxtapositioning of the two quite different registers of spirality
tends to confuse a clear reading rather than facilitate it. Spirality becomes
an ambiguous force on the website—it works to suggest movement, to
imply dynamism, but it also avoids contextual explication. The one thing
we can be very sure of is that neither presented forms are circles. Indeed,
more than anything, the presence of spirality on sdlogic.net serves as a
rhetorical positioning against circularity. As Vergani (1999) has noted in
regard to the place of spirality in Dogon cosmology, the spiral is the
“dynamic expression” of the transformation of the circular into infinite
growth. Circles just go around and around, after all—they do not evolve,
their dynamic is stilted. Whether the spiral is moving ever inwards or ever
outwards is not as important as the fact that its energy is evolving.
Now, what is most interesting in the apparent rhetorical anti-circularity
of the imagery of the website is the fact that it is the circular form that
dominates the actual diagramming populating the pages of S-D logic
discourse. The spiral form does not feature in any of what we might judge
178 C. Miles
to be the canonical diagrams of S-D logic. The closest we might come,

perhaps, is a vaguely suggested spiralling upwards from micro through
meso to macro levels in the diagramming of the structuration of service
ecosystems (vide Exhibit 8.5, Lusch and Vargo, 2014, p. 171). However,
as the authors point out, the relationship between the levels is essentially
circular in that “once the macro is structured it has a downward influence
on the meso and micro levels” (p. 170). For the purposes of our examina-
tion of the visual rhetoric of sdlogic.net, it is enough to underline the
deep spirality of the imagery that is presented across its pages and to
repeat the general connotations of the figure with dynamic progression.
The way in which this impression of a progressive gyre links rhetorically
to the more verbal aspects of the persuasive enterprise to be found on the
website is something that will become hopefully more apparent as we
begin to examine the strategies that serve to amplify the ethos of the cen-
tral arguments of the logic.
Use of Video
The sdlogic.net site currently embeds videos on two pages, the Multimedia
page and the Classroom Material page. The latter page includes embed-
ded slides as well as videos but also presents sectioned reading lists divided
between ‘Core Readings’ and ‘S-D Logic Compatible Readings’ (an inter-
esting choice of adjectival phrase). I will examine those lists in more detail
from a visual rhetorical perspective in a later section. The titling of the
Multimedia page perhaps speaks to its length of service (the page appears
to have been added to the site in late 2010, according to the Internet
Archive timeline). It currently includes two videos rendering as black
squares with the notice, ‘Video unavailable—This video is private’ and
there are also three further links to videos hosted on external sites that are
now broken (or refuse to play as they use Flash—a format that was dep-
recated across web browsers in 2020). Broken links or unavailable
resources do inevitably have an impact upon a site’s ethos. At the very
least, they imply a lack of regular housekeeping on behalf of the site own-
ers. More fundamentally, they can hint at abandonment of the project (or
the web site component of a project)—if major elements and resources
are not being maintained then this might be because they are no longer
considered important by those running the site. Sdlogic.net is not the
web presence of a multi-million dollar retail brand or even an interna-
tional NGO, though, and consistent web maintenance is challenging
even for organisations who are paying staff to undertake it. The broken
links and broken resources, however, do speak of a sub-optimal level of
attention that carries inevitable risk for the carefully constructed rhetori-
cal amplification of ethos across the rest of the site.
The above issues are mitigated somewhat by the provision of perfectly
working, valuable video resources on the Multimedia page. Indeed, the
clear focus of the page is a series of three videos featuring Robert Lusch,
‘filmed in Capri, Italy 2009’ that have formed the core of the Multimedia
page of sdlogic.net since the page was first published in 2010. Their con-
tinued availability speaks to how effective they are as presentations of S-D
logic thought. The three videos amount to almost 27 minutes of Robert
Lusch responding to questions from Pekka Helle (whose YouTube chan-
nel is the source for these embedded Capri videos). Lusch is seated in a
relaxed manner in front of a rustic stone interior wall and there are occa-
sional noises-off that sound like cups and plates being moved. The light-
ing is soft and ambient and gives the impression of a cool room on a
sunny day. Pekka Helle is off-camera, and Lusch speaks to him (rather
than addressing the camera) and this helps to construct an informal, con-
versational context. The whole effect is certainly a lot more visually attrac-
tive than a video of a conference presentation in a lecture hall with a
PowerPoint in the background. Lusch does not have to raise his voice to
reach a room of conference attendees which further contributes to the
intimate, relaxed tone. The stone wall background provides a sense of
solidity and continuity—the green tub chair that Lusch sits in an intrigu-
ing echo of Freud’s consulting milieu (Verene, 1997). The questions
posed by Helle are also written on the screen in a white sans serif typeface
allowing for easy searching across the videos for particular topics covered.
It is worth noting a curious point about the three Capri videos—
namely, that there is actually a fourth Capri video that is not embedded
or linked anywhere on sdlogic.net but is present on Pekka Helle’s own
YouTube channel. It is given the title of ‘Part 4/3’ and was uploaded on
the same day (December 10, 2010) as the ‘Part 3/3’ video that is
180 C. Miles
embedded on the Multimedia page. The reason for the absence of the
‘extra’ ‘Part 4/3’ video is not clear. Its content is focused on where Lusch
sees S-D Logic going in the future and how he and Vargo feel about the
planning that evolution. It also touches (in the lightest of possible ways)
on US politics of the time, with Lusch noting how Obama’s grassroots
campaign seems to embody many of the S-D logic ideals. There certainly
doesn’t seem to be anything from the perspective of quality or content
that would preclude the video being embedded on the Multimedia page
at sdlogic.net along with the other three Capri videos.
There are currently four other embedded videos on the Multimedia
page that feature Lusch again in the embedded thumbnail: an interview
for the University of Arizona marketing group YouTube channel uploaded
in 2011, and Lusch’s presentation to the 2013 World Social Marketing
Congress in Toronto. Of the remaining two embedded videos on the
page, one shows Vargo being interviewed by Raquel Baptista for the
Inside Marketing YouTube channel in 2017, and one is a B2B Whiteboard
animated YouTube video on ‘What is Service Dominant Logic?’ uploaded
in 2011. While dominated by the presence of the late Robert Lusch,
there is clearly a variety of video presentation on offer here, though it is
noticeable that there is nothing more recent than 2017. Given the increas-
ing prominence of video as a tool of both branding and online instruc-
tion, the continued provision of reasonably up-to-date video content
helps to indicate commitment and seriousness (and therefore generate
ethos) for S-D logic. From a research perspective, we also expect to see
evidence of continued conceptual development—to assure us that the
perspective or mind-set has not been abandoned or become moribund.
This is where the use of digital platforms becomes a double-edged
sword—they are cheap, easy to edit and under our control, but they also
require constant upkeep and they need to be provisioned with changing
and renewed content in order to do the job of promoting a dynamic,
responsive research project.
The Multimedia page videos give the clear impression that the S-D
logic is in the hands of Vargo and Lusch—they are the presences that
provide authoritative explication of the mind-set, the voices from which
we hear the principles and axioms. The animation of the B2B Whiteboard
video demonstrates a commitment to new educational formats but within
certain clear limits—the fact that the animated class is led by Professor
Siegfried who is a spitting image for Albert Einstein is one more instance
of the ad antiquitatem and deference to authority appeals that are so cen-
tral to S-D logic’s persuasive strategy and also ends up pushing a rather
Eurocentric form of imagery. Interestingly, this use of European cultural
tropes to establish ethos also comes from the overall dominance on the
Multimedia page of content from Italy. Of course, from a practical per-
spective one would point out that this is because the Naples Forum on
Service has been such a supportive venue for the dissemination of S-D
logic research over the years. But, at the same time, a cursory look at a list
of all the presentations that have been made by Lusch and Vargo since
2004 (conveniently found on the Presentation page of sdlogic.net) shows
us that the Naples Forum is just one out of many, many venues around
the world where S-D logic has been propounded by its originators. From
the perspective of visual rhetoric, we might point out, though, that the
connotations of Italy as a modern representative of the Classical past,
with all the weight of the history of Western civilisation that this entails,
cannot but be an attractive setting from which to communicate a mind-
set that pays so much attention to constructing its place in history.
Before we leave the discussion of the video components on sdlogic.net,
we should consider the embedded videos on the Classroom Material
page. Once again, we have a video shot by Inside Marketing featuring
Raquel Baptista interviewing someone in a leafy bower at the 2017
Naples Forum—not Stephen Vargo this time, but Thomas Gruen, who is
talking about how he integrates S-D logic into his MBA classes at the
University of New Hampshire. Alongside this short interview, the page
also embeds a PowerPoint of Gruen’s talk at the 2019 Naples Forum in
which he goes into a lot more detail regarding his method for permeating
an S-D logic mindset throughout his course topics. The PowerPoint dem-
onstrates the use he makes of a number of TV ads and a clip from the
movie Confessions of a Shopaholic and these are also separately embedded
on the page so that visitors can view them in their entirety. The multime-
dia elements on the Classroom Materials page are therefore the product
of Thomas Gruen’s work—they represent an inspirational model for how
S-D logic can be brought into the classroom and provide a number of
suggestions for ways to engage students with a perspective that can be
182 C. Miles
quite daunting when met in some of the original canonical articles. The
use of video elements from popular culture and advertising ‘lightens’ the
cognitive load, perhaps, but also serves to make theory relevant in attrac-
tive and engaging terms. Of great significance to the larger issue of S-D
logic’s relationship with promotional communication is the fact that
Gruen uses quite classically persuasive advertising to exemplify an S-D
logic mindset. I have pointed out in Chap. 1 some of the tension around
marketing thought’s engagement with the ideas of manipulation and per-
suasion, and I noted there that persuasive does not have to mean manipu-
lative. It is interesting to see here, though, the glamour and energy that
the embedded ads and movie clips bring to the page and to note how this
mirrors the clear tactical reasoning for their use in class, as intimated in
Gruen’s PP presentation.
Tables and Figures
Tables, figures, and diagrams play an important part in Vargo and Lusch’s
foundational 2004 article, as discussed in Chap. 3. On sdlogic.net they
make their appearance on the Foundations page, where there are two
tables, or ‘exhibits’, as they are described in the introductory paragraph.
Versions of these tables will be familiar to those who have worked their
way through the S-D logic canon, as they are expressly adapted from
tables presented in Vargo and Lusch (2004, 2008, 2016) and Lusch and
Vargo (2006).
The introductory paragraph on the Foundations page situates the data
contained in the tables within a compact historical narrative that serves
to summarise the evolution of the axioms and foundational premises.
However, the exact chronological sequence is presented in a rather unclear
manner. So, we read that S-D logic “is captured in eleven foundational
premises (FPs), which were intended to establish a framework for the
service-centered mindset”. Of course, this is not strictly accurate in that
the 2004 foundational article presents only 8 foundational premises. As
we have seen in Chap. 4, there has been a slow accretion of FPs and then
axioms over time. Yet, the opening sentence quoted above gives the clear
impression that there were 11 FPs from the start. The website then
continues to explain that “since the first introduction of the foundational

premises, Vargo and Lusch have realized that some of the original FPs
could be derived from others and, thus, have identified five FPs from this
expanded set of eleven as particularly foundational, essentially the axioms
of S-D logic”. So, the eleven FPs are retroactively designated an “expanded
set” and there is an ambiguous distinction made between the “some of
the original FPs” and “others” (does this mean that within the original set
some of the FPs could be derived from the others, or does it mean that
some of the original FPS could be derived from others that were not at
that point in the set?). The identification of the axioms as the FPs that are
“particularly foundational” and therefore “essentially axioms” (are they
axioms or are they essentially axioms?) seems rather a bathetic choice of
phrasing. However, what is perhaps most important here is the portrayal
of Vargo and Lusch as reflecting thinkers capable of revision, expansion
and re-definition. Rather than clarity of historical sequence, what is pri-
oritised in this introductory paragraph to the two tabular ‘exhibits’ is that
they are the result of evolution in thinking—history is gestured to,
touched upon, approached, but only in so far as it can sketch a setting for
the dramatization of the process of reflective, progressive building up of
the logic and also provide the sort of vague ad antiquitatem that rhetori-
cally helps to amplify ethos.
However, the tables themselves visually communicate finality and cer-
tainty. They are minimally styled (in the sense that they rely upon the
default html styling for tables) with only the use of a light green back-
ground and black colour for the cells containing the axioms (to indicate
their “particularly foundational” status in contrast to the regular FPs
which remain in the default dark grey, HEX#868686, of sdlogic.net’s
main textual content). This means that they display the solid, double-
lined table style of html—a very closed, cage-like rendering of data that
connotes certainty and control. There is no room for later additions, no
significant use of negative space to provide ‘air’ around the data, no sense
that this data is still being collected or might be revised in the future.
Each of the two tables is like a museum case—indeed, an ‘exhibit’—
sealed off and partitioned appropriately. This is, after all, the Foundations
page and these are the Foundational Premises—one would not want to
build anything on shifting, unstable foundations and the use of tables
184 C. Miles
here, and their chosen styling, helps to communicate the message that,
while there has been historical evolution, the foundations are strong and
certain.
There is an interesting tension between the visual solidity offered by
the tables and the commentary that makes up the second part of the
introductory paragraph. After explaining that many of the concepts in
the FPs “are neither exclusive to nor invented by S-D logic itself ”, the
final sentence of the paragraph provides a curious summation of what the
S-D logic actually represents. It “captures shifting contemporary market-
ing thought, in which marketing is seen as a facilitator of ongoing pro-
cesses of voluntary exchange through collaborative, value-creating
relationships among actors”. What is the meaning of describing contem-
porary marketing thought as “shifting” here? And how can S-D logic
capture shifting thought? Does this mean that it continually has to be
revised so that, in the end, its foundations are shifting, too? How else can
foundations reflect shifting thought? But then, what sort of foundations
would they be? The questions that arise from the consideration of the
language used here are many. The rhetorical use of history and the con-
struction of a narrative of reflexive evolution for the logic are inevitably
in tension with efforts to solidify, and canonicalise, such things as foun-
dational principles and, therefore, a ‘logic’.
The second tabular exhibit is titled ‘Underlying Conceptual Transitions
to a S-D Logic’ and provides a further example of how this tension can
manifest itself. The tabular rendering of this description of the transitions
from goods to service logic again connotes clarity, certainty, and com-
pleteness. Although the information in the table itself speaks of ongoing
transitions, and therefore emphasises the evolving nature of the S-D
mind-set, the visual representation gives a different, far more finalised
impression. Furthermore, the caption to this table describes it as adapted
from Lusch and Vargo (2006), something which serves to undercut the
idea of a transitional period. There is no further explanation of the con-
tents of the table—how long is this period of transitional concepts meant
to last? Has it, indeed, already finished and are we now living in the age
of S-D logic? Or has the transition stalled? Certainly, a visitor might ask
themselves what this ‘capturing’ of ‘shifting contemporary marketing
thought’ represents if it comes from 2006. The tension between needing
to portray S-D logic as an agile, responsive mindset on the one hand and
a historically grounded, canonical structure on the other is once more in
evidence.
The Foundations page has been a part of the sdlogic.net site since
mid-2011 (this is as far back as the Internet Archive has a saved version
of the page and the saved version of the site from 2010 has no indication
of a related menu item). In its initial iteration it appeared largely similar
to its current incarnation (introductory paragraph and two tabular ‘exhib-
its’)—with two major difference. There are 10 FPs rather than 11 and no
indication of any axioms (and no corresponding mention of these in the
introductory paragraph). The expansion, of course, occurred with the
publication of Lusch and Vargo (2014) and then Vargo and Lusch’s
(2016) ‘Institutions and Axioms’ paper in the Journal of the Academy of
Marketing Science—though this paper was published online in July
2015 and the related changes to the Foundations page on the website
were made by November of 2015 (a good example of the kairotic advan-
tages of web publishing for an evolving paradigm). In this sense, the addi-
tional sentence included in the introductory paragraph from late 2015
onward describing the historical reflexivity that lead to the realisation of
the axiomatic status of some of the FPs, can be seen as a justification for
the change in web content on the Foundations page. However, it does
not refer to the change in a very explicit manner—indeed, there is no
clear sense that there used to be a different number and arrangement of
FPs on this very page. Web publishing (outside of the ‘nerdy’ explorations
of the Internet Archive) allows you to act as if the page has always been
this way. This is not happening here, exactly—but the framing that the
explanatory sentence introduced in late 2015 produces is, as discussed
above, one of a vague, reflexive historicity with no obvious temporal
anchor points (beyond the small print of the citations on the table cap-
tions that require familiarity with the canon to interpret in such a man-
ner). In the end, the Foundations page could have had a clear explanation
of what exactly was updated and how. The absence of such clarity, the
choice to frame the change in the representation of the FPs in the way
that has been done here, is a rhetorical one—designed to communicate a
particular impression to the reader.
186 C. Miles
Listing of Data
A further aspect of the site’s visual rhetoric that requires examination is

the manner in which certain types of information are presented in long,
largely unorganised lists that require significant scrolling. The need for a
visitor to scroll on a single page can be rhetorically used as a digital instan-
tiation of the argumentum ad numerum—in other words, there is so
much ‘stuff’ here that it must be good. We might also see this as a visual/
material form of the classical rhetorical figure of congeries or as Lanham
(1991) succinctly defines it, “word heaps”. So, the sheer accumulation of
entries in a list can rhetorically serve to impress, to convince, to persuade.
In digital rhetoric, where the affordances of interaction provide a further
dimension of audience experience, one cannot but notice that scrolling is
a physical act of repetition. So, on sdlogic.net pages such as Publications,
Presentations, and Awards and Recognitions, the need to repeatedly scroll
down the page to read the long list of heaped items contributes to the
rhetorical accumulation of persuasive power. We are intellectually and
physically affected by the heaping. Bradshaw (2020) has written of the
“exhaustive rhetoric” that can become typical of the infinite scrolling
design of modern social media platforms. This is not quite what is going
on at sdlogic.net, of course, because there is an end, eventually, to these
lists. However, Bradshaw’s connection of modern ‘exhaustive rhetoric’
with the rhetorical strategy of accumulatio does allow us to highlight the
manner in which the long listings on these pages function not just to
provide the interested visitor with useful information to understand S-D
logic but also experience the volume of scholarship and recognition that
the mindset has generated in a convincingly visceral way.
Colour
The colours used across sdlogic.net are quite minimal. The general back-
ground colour for all elements across all the site’s pages is white
(HEX#fafafa), the general typeface for body copy and navigation menus
is rendered in a mid-grey (HEX#868686), the h2 level headers used as
section titles on each page are in teal (HEX#248d6c), the hover-over
backgrounds for items in the navigation menu are in a lighter, more

minty, teal (HEX#d9f9eb). The hyperlinks in the body content of pages
default to whatever colour the browser you are viewing them with uses
(so, in the current case of Chrome, HEX#0066CC, a light blue, for an
unvisited link).1 Pracejus et al. (2006) have shown how the increasing use
of white space in advertising executions has reflected connotations of
prestige, power, trust, leadership, as well as modernity and luxury associ-
ated with the Minimalist movement, the growth of corporate art and
design, and the ‘less is more’ movement in upscale interior design and
architecture. Advertising uses white (or empty) space to transfer these
connotations across to products and brands and a similar dynamic oper-
ates in other design spheres such as web site authoring. The large empty
margins and ample use of negative space in the sdlogic.net layout works
rhetorically, then, to communicate to the visitor that the ideas presented
within its pages are modern, trustworthy, and prestigious.
The choice of teal (a bluey green) for the headers is important because
it echoes the colour associations that have been building around S-D
logic since the striking green cover of Lusch & Vargo’s edited (2006) col-
lection, The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing: Dialog, Debate, and
Directions. We see a lighter green across the cover of Lusch and Vargo’s
(2014) book, which also introduces the Maori koru, discussed above
(and the koru pictured on the cover is in a green jade). This colour coor-
dination is seemingly abandoned in the design of the 2018 SAGE
Handbook, although the subheadings on the cover are rendered in an
interesting greenish yellow. The website’s use of teal green helps it to con-
nect out to the printed tradition of the evolving mindset, but perhaps
more importantly, to the more general colour connotations of the shade.
Armstrong’s (2010) meta-review of the work on the informative and per-
suasive use of colour concludes that, “colors affect information and emo-
tions, in ways that differ from culture to culture” (p. 211). While green
1
I am not sure if this is intentional. A look at the CSS for the site would seem to indicate that
hyperlinks should be rendered in the same teal that is used for the h2 headers—and that is certainly
the case for the hyperlink out to StartLogic in the footer. It would appear that there might be a
‘cascade’ problem in the Cascading Style Sheets here. Certainly, one would have thought that the
overall design unity of the site might be improved by all hyperlinks using the teal rather than
defaulting to individual browser choice.
188 C. Miles
does indeed have some interesting culture-dependent connotations (it is

generally associated with Islam in Arabic or Muslim cultures in a way that
is entirely absent in Judeo-Christian cultures, for example), because of its
indexical relationship with plant growth, and therefore ‘nature’, there is
strong rhetorical power in its adoption at sdlogic.net (particularly when
it is highlighted in the context of little other use of colour in the overall
design). A mindset which uses the metaphor of evolution so consistently
across its thinking, and that has increased its scope to include not just
marketing and organisations but human society as a whole would benefit
from using colour connotations that speak of natural growth and the
positive energy of life.
The Home Page and Rhetorical History

Outside of the navigation menu, book promotions, and the header dis-
cussed above, the site’s Home page contains two major components—a
single, dense paragraph under the heading ‘What is S-D Logic?’ followed
by a series of quotes presented under the heading ‘Historical Perspectives
on S-D Logic’. These two sections function as the core definition and
argumentative context of S-D logic. As they exist on the web they can be
updated and replaced as needed, of course, and it is worth noting that the
original 2005 Home page was similarly constructed around two sec-
tions—a single, slightly less dense paragraph under the heading ‘Welcome:
Robert FD: Lusch and Stephen L. Vargo’ and exactly the same series of
quotes under the same heading of ‘Historical Perspectives on S-D Logic’.
Even in 2022, then, the substance of the Home page mirrors the 2004
foundational JoM article in its foregrounding of a historical lineage for
the new logic. The list of quotes from Bastiat, Alderson, Kotler,
Gummesson, and Grönroos provide a chronologically framed sequence
of evidence for the ethos of the S-D perspective. Even if a visitor was not
familiar with the names themselves, the dates provided for the quotations
speak to the weight of their historical presence. This is placed in tense
juxtaposition to the emphasis in the opening paragraph on escape, on
‘breaking free’.
The construction of the paragraph under the heading ‘What is S-D

Logic?’ is of utmost importance in an examination of how the website
persuasively positions its message. It opens by describing the logic as a
“mindset for a unified understanding of the purpose and nature of orga-
nizations, markets and society”, namely, the “exchange of service”. The
choice of the word ‘mindset’ here is interesting in its social construction-
ist implications—it implies a perspective that one has in looking upon
the world rather than a vision of the world as it empirically might be. The
opening sentence also argues that this perspective is one that can provide
the “purpose and nature” to not just marketing but also organisations and
society. The size of the claim is perhaps easy to miss as it is buried at the
end of the sentence and also because the rest of the paragraph primarily
focuses on marketing, but the ambition is unmistakably there—S-D
logic can provide an “understanding” of the purpose and nature of society
as a whole, not just firms and markets—“all economies and societies are
service based”. This ambition, the sense of providing a radical new vision,
is also aided by the rhetorical centre point of the paragraph, which func-
tions as a weak form of antithesis: “instead of service marketing ‘breaking
free’ from goods marketing, as has been the pursuit of the services mar-
keting sub-discipline for the last several decades, all of marketing needs to
break free from the goods and manufacturing-based model”. This recasts
a rather niche aspect of marketing theory (service marketing’s efforts to
distinguish itself from goods marketing) in terms of a fundamental over-
turning of what is meant by marketing as a whole. The metaphor of
escape provides a strong pathos to the claim, implying that the goods
marketing perspective is holding the discipline back, retarding progress,
enveloping scholars in heavy chains of misunderstanding. The freedom
provided by the new mindset is further linguistically characterised by the
distinction that S-D logic ‘instructs’ firms to “market with customers”
rather than “to” them. The connotations of the two opposed prepositions
are vital for the positive portrayal of S-D logic as an egalitarian, dialogi-
cal, relationship oriented perspective as opposed to the monological, dic-
tatorial stance of the goods-dominant model.
As intimated above, there is a degree of tension between the ‘What is
S-D Logic?’ and ‘Historical Perspectives on S-D Logic’ paragraphs on the
Home page. How can a mindset which promises to break free from the
190 C. Miles
goods-dominant model that currently enchains all of marketing be sup-

ported by quotes from marketing’s historical greats? If such foundational
voices as Bastiat, Alderson, and Kotler have been championing the
service-centred view of marketing and economics, why are we in a situa-
tion where we need to break free of a goods-based dominant perspective?
Why were these influential voices not listened to? The tension arises from
the rhetorical use of historical precedent that is a common persuasive
strategy across the S-D logic canon. As Sudabby et al. (2010) have dem-
onstrated, history can be used as a source of competitive advantage, and
they adopt the term “rhetorical history” (p. 157) to describe the “strategic
use of the past as a persuasive strategy to manage key stakeholders in a
firm”, or, as we might say in terms of the environment currently our
focus, the current and potential stakeholders in a marketing theory mind-
set. The ranging of the five quotes from historical marketing luminaries
serves to amplify the ethos of the S-D logic, promoting a “deference to
authority” (Cialdini, 2001) and establishing a significant historical lin-
eage that constructs an argumentum ad antiquitatem. The exact wording
of the heading here is telling—the quotes are presented as historical per-
spectives “on S-D logic” as if the assorted figures cited in the sequence
are providing their perspectives on the emancipating mindset put for-
ward by Vargo and Lusch. The heading could have been worded differ-
ently—‘Historical Perspectives Supporting S-D Logic’ would be an
obvious example of an alternative phrasing without the subtle implica-
tions of historical co-location that the original carries. ‘Historical
Precedents for the S-D Logic Mindset’ would be even more accurate,
perhaps. The choice of the preposition, ‘on’ in the site’s phrasing is a pow-
erful one, though, and, in the light of the explicit use of prepositional
distinctions in the final part of the ‘What is S-D Logic?’ section, just
before the heading in question, it becomes even more significant for an
audience now primed to such word choices.
The tension mentioned above between the description of S-D logic as
a mindset that breaks free from the goods-based model and the construc-
tion of ‘rhetorical history’ is an interesting one because it helps to inti-
mate an ‘alternative’ form of history, or counter-history, for the marketing
discipline that is characterised by a Manichean struggle between two
forces (the goods logic and the service logic). Given that Dan Brown’s The
Da Vinci Code was published in 2003 it would be fair to say that the
counter-history genre was very much part of the zeitgeist during the
development of S-D logic. Chapter 3 traces the ways in which this con-
struction of a counter-history for marketing is a foundational rhetorical
strategy in the evolution of S-D logic. The fact that it is embedded in the
Home Page of sdlogic.net should not be a surprise, then, but it is indica-
tive of how central it is to the persuasive framing of Vargo and Lusch’s logic.
Pathos
In terms of the rhetorical proof of pathos, sdlogic.net provides a few obvi-
ous points to analyse; firstly, there is a page dedicated to the late Robert
Lusch, titled In Memoriam, secondly there is the general sense of excite-
ment that can be generated by the Announcements and Awards and
Recognitions pages, and finally the way in which a number of elements
already discussed above contribute to a sense of impressiveness (indicating
how pathos and ethos often work together persuasively).
In Memoriam
An In Memoriam web page, like an obituary in a newspaper, or a funeral

oration, is an example of epideictic rhetoric, which is a “discourse of
praise and blame” (Lauer, 2015, p. 4) and one of the three traditional
branches of the rhetorical enterprise (as discussed in Chap. 2). We are
performing epideictic when we try to convince our friends of the won-
derfulness of a new artist or film we have just discovered, or equally when
we are trying to convince them of the irredeemable triteness of their
choice of smartphone (or social networking platform, or operating sys-
tem, or political candidate, etc.). Indeed, marketing communication and
so much of contemporary online discourse all seem to be focused around
particularly extreme forms of the epideictic mode—either breathless
enthusiasm and stumping for particular brands, personalities, social
groupings and political systems or seething invective against the same.
The eulogy, however, is one of the oldest forms of formal epideictic and
192 C. Miles
even in its varied online manifestations often seems to retain much of the
weight, solemnity, and decorum that its offline instantiations seek to
evoke. The subject matter is, after all, the death of a loved one, a friend, a
respected colleague. An oration in such a context will inevitably have to
deal with the profound implications of death, the meaning and signifi-
cance of life, and how those left behind will remember the one who has
gone. Of course, many eulogies function at the moment of the funeral
ceremony and only continue on in memory. Others can have a much
more public life—broadcast at the time of their delivery perhaps, and
even recorded and distributed in one medium or another. The Internet
has provided, almost since its inception, the prospect of “virtual forms of
memorialization” (Kern et al., 2013)—complete web sites, web pages,
and dedicated pages on social networking sites such as Facebook and
MySpace, as well as the businesses that have sprung up to offer virtual
memorialisation ‘as a service’, have all helped to make the idea of remem-
bering the deceased online an increasingly common practice (Hess,
2007). The sdlogic.net page dedicated to the memory of Robert Lusch
functions to praise the deceased, generating pathos around his memory,
but also to amplify the ethos of his S-D logic legacy, the sense of com-
munity around that legacy, and the understanding of the values that are
embedded in it.
As Hess (2007), notes, “the process of commemoration, simply by
what is or is not commemorated, is inherently ideological in its forma-
tion” (p. 813). The structure, epideictic arguments, and style of the In
Memoriam page for Robert Lusch present us with rhetorical choices that
have been made in order to praise the deceased in ways that those manag-
ing the website would view as most effective and appropriate. Yet, these
choices are not just made with a view to praising Lusch—they also, quite
logically, aid in the praising of S-D logic itself—the mindset that he cre-
ated and evolved in concert with Stephen Vargo over a decade and a half.
The public memorialisation of Lusch on the website therefore integrates
into the larger rhetorical project of the continuing growth and defence of
S-D logic, the maintenance of its viability. The death of one of the co-
founders must inevitably raise questions regarding its future—the In
Memoriam is an opportunity, therefore, to project strength and confi-
dence as well as praise the deceased and what he helped co-found.
The In Memoriam page consists of a brightly lit picture of Robert

Lusch sitting smiling at his office desk. His hands are relaxedly placed on
the desk next to a pair of open-armed eyeglasses that are placed as if he
has just energetically slipped them off his face to look at the viewer with-
out their encumbering filter. Next to this photograph is the title, ‘In
Memoriam: Robert Lusch’, an explanatory subtitle (‘Professor Robert
Lusch died Thursday, February 23, 2017 after a long battle with cancer’),
followed by a paragraph written by Stephen Vargo (using the first per-
son). After this first paragraph Vargo then explains that he has “received
notes of grief and remembrance from many in this community” and then
extracts, anonymously, ten of these immediately below, finally, then,
signing off with his name. Underneath all this are three hyperlinks, one
to the eulogy written for Lusch by David Schmidz at the request of
Virgina Lusch (hosted directly on sdlogic.net), one to the University of
Arizona’s In Memoriam page for Lusch, and one to the separate com-
memoration page on the American Marketing Association’s website.
The tone throughout the In Memoriam page (and its related internal
and external linked pages) is entirely epideictic. Vargo’s first person
expression of his personal feelings at the loss of a friend and collaborator
are the only place on the website where the authorial voice of the web
content is clearly identifiable as the voice of Stephen Vargo and this
means it has a strong personalising effect. The public expression of senti-
ment can contribute to the amplification of the speaker’s ethos—it
underlines their humanity, their similarity to us, and their openness to
emotion. Inevitably, in this context, this will reflect upon the ethos of the
logic itself. In addition, given the ways in which S-D logic engages with
constructions and portrayals of ‘history’, the In Memoriam serves to fur-
ther historicise the foundation and evolution of S-D logic—the anony-
mous quotations under Vargo’s homage speak of “influence”,
“contribution”, “novel insights”, “charting new ground” and of how “you
[Vargo] and he built a community of passionate researchers”. All of these
statements use the epideictic mode to attest to the significance of Robert
Lusch’s work and therefore the significance of S-D logic. They form an
argumentum ad populum (or social proof ) that strengthens the sense of
many scholars thinking in the same way, committed to the evolution of
the logic, and continuing Lusch’s legacy alongside Vargo. The linked
194 C. Miles
eulogy from Schmidz depicts a man of great resources and an enquiring

mind who had a propensity for exploring and discussing the ethical issues
that Schmidz researches and teaches. It also fleshes out the portrait of
Lusch in terms of his family life and broader career and service. It is an
affecting piece of writing that makes good use of stylistic devices and a
personal tone to establish both pathos and ethos proofs of Lusch’s stature.
The UoA and AMA linked pages similarly construct a portrait of a much-
loved and influential man. The voices raised in praise here inevitably con-
tribute towards the ad populum and ad numerum effect and the outpouring
of affection for Lusch in evidence here provides a halo of positive senti-
ment that reflects persuasively on the S-D logic founders, community,
and enterprise in general.
Announcements, Awards and Recognition
The In Memoriam page naturally carries a lot of emotional weight and

serves a key pathos role on sdlogic.net. However, there are other impor-
tant sources of emotional proof that should be noted. In any website, an
Announcements or News page can help to excite—the prospect of learn-
ing something new, of coming across an unknown opportunity, of being
let in on the latest scoop, are all established reasons for why we are drawn
to following and seeking out news sources. Even if we take the dominant
motivation for news consumption in the uses and gratifications litera-
ture, namely, to be informed (Lee, 2013), we can see that this has a pathos
component—one wants to be informed in order to feel more in control,
more secure. In seeking to be informed, we are seeking to reduce uncer-
tainty and instability in our mental maps of the world. Someone who
provides you with the opportunity to satisfy that quest for certainty and
stability is constructing a pathos proof that helps to promote their argu-
ments. Such pages also serve a strong ethos proof function that works in
tandem with the pathos proof demonstrating exciting, lively community
and continued health. The Announcements menu item on sdlogic.net
has three components—it contains two ‘on hover’ drop down compo-
nents, one titled ‘FMM’ and the other titled ‘Naples Forum’ and, in addi-
tion, the Parent item, ‘Announcements’ can be clicked on itself to take
you to the general Announcements page. The FMM page is hosted on

sdlogic.net and is dedicated to the Forum for Markets and Marketing, a
S-D logic focused conference that has been running since 2008. The cur-
rent iteration of this page calls for ‘expressions of interest’ for the sixth
FMM to be held in 2018. Obviously, this is quite out-of-date at the time
of writing this in 2022. The Naples Forum menu item links out to the
home page of the Naples Forum on Service website (naplesforumonser-
vice.it), which, again at the time of writing in 2022, displays information
about the 2021 Naples Forum. The Announcements page itself contains
a News Flash section which starts off with a headline announcing Vargo
and Lusch’s receipt of the ISSIP Fellow awards in 2015. There is a column
on the right for Upcoming Presentations (empty), for Upcoming
Conferences (links out to the 2019 Naples Forum), and then for
Upcoming Projects (also empty). From a rhetorical perspective, these
announcement elements are not doing a very persuasive job of convinc-
ing visitors that the S-D logic is healthy and vibrant. Rather than decreas-
ing uncertainty, they are injecting it into the visitor’s experience—why
are there no ‘news flashes’ later than 2015? Is there going to be another
Naples Forum? Is there going to be another Forum on Markets and
Marketing? What does all this mean for the state of S-D logic right now?
The poor maintenance of announcement and news pages on websites is
always something that will risk negative pathos outcomes for visitors—a
sense of disappointment and confusion around the legitimacy and cur-
rency of the site as a whole and any brand associated with it. A similar
situation is found on the Awards and Recognitions page, where the long
roll call of impressive scholarly honours that have been afforded Vargo
and Lusch in concert and individually peter out in 2017 with the
announcement that they had been included on the Clarivate Analytics
2014–2017 list of Most Influential Scientific Minds. The absence of any
recognition after that year has a significant cooling effect on the sense of
buzz and excitement that the page should be producing (and, indeed, did
produce until 2017). Digital venues such as websites carry a sense of
immediacy, of presenting the ‘latest’ information, the most up-to-date
version of events—they can be revised and edited with very little effort
(in comparison to non-digital media) and so we tend to assume that what
is present on a website is the result of continuing curation. However,
196 C. Miles
websites are “unfixed by their very nature” (Eyman, 2015, p. 111) and
this leads to a tension within the ethos of the medium—we expect the lat-
est information from the web because of its interactive, easy-to-edit, non-
gatekeeper nature while at the same time it is the low barrier to entry that
makes websites so easy to ‘abandon’ (even if someone continues to pay for
the domain name and the hosting). And abandonment can connote a
number of negative ethos judgements—lack of interest on behalf of the
site authors, lack of success for the project, and so on. For sdlogic.net at
the time of writing in 2022, the absence of up-to-date information pro-
duces an impression of a once-thriving mindset now in a period of hiatus.
Curious young scholars who find their way to the web site might well be
positively affected by the many rhetorical strategies on display but could
be overwhelmed by the worrying suspicion that the logic is moribund.
If one makes use of rhetorical strategies designed to leverage the cur-
rency, recognition, and newsworthiness of an intellectual brand into an
energetic proof of ethos then the risk is that all the content forming these
strategies become a liability when it ceases to be, indeed, current. The
sdlogic.net site loses its kairotic advantage—and rather than seeming at
the frothing leading edge of a torrent of ideas and scholarship, S-D logic
appears as if it has slipped into the backwaters. This impression can, natu-
rally, be immediately reversed by updating content—and the web is for-
giving in this way; any new visitor to the site the day after its content is
updated would have no way of knowing (outside of trawling the Internet
Archive or reading this analysis) that there had been a gap of years in
updated content. This is a good indication of the potential fragility of
rhetorical strategies in the online environment.
Conclusion
The simple existence of sdlogic.net is in itself a strong ethos argument for
the relevance and forward-facing character of the mindset and its found-
ers. Other perspectives in marketing scholarship might have Facebook
groups (Consumer Culture Theory) or old-fashioned journals of their
own (the Industrial Marketing & Purchasing group) as well as the usual
conferences and Special Interest Groups. However, they all pale in
comparison to the consistent digital presence that has been maintained

for S-D logic since the early days after its foundation. That consistency,
along with the many other indications of regard, community involve-
ment, conceptual health, all rhetorically contribute to a compelling nar-
rative of S-D logic as a unifying, evolving, even transcending mindset.
The website provides an engaging marketing of the logic, though the
perennial challenge of updating both site content and site aesthetic means
that what can at one point represent a persuasive energy can very quickly
come to offer a vision of stasis and abandonment.
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6
The Rhetoric of Emerging Systems
Systems Theory & Cybernetics

In Chap. 3 I have talked about Bettis and Prahalad’s (1995) use of sys-
tems theory as a framing in their theory of the dominant logic of an
organisation and noted that I would return to the topic again in Chap. 6.
This work is important as a precursor for S-D logic (or some aspects of
it). In Chap. 4 I also talk about the use of General Systems Theory in Kiel
et al. (1992) and note that the systems framing that is there is largely
absent from V&L 2004—and that this might be an artefact of the review
process, or it might be a rhetorical strategy taking into consideration the
general marketing scholarship audience of the JoM. I also note in that
chapter that an increasing use of concepts drawn from systems thought
can be seen in the foundational discourse of S-D logic as it evolves
through the years. In this chapter I will examine how and why S-D logic
might be incorporating more systems theory and cybernetics framings in
its conceptualisation. My focus is, of course, on the rhetorical signifi-
cance of these concepts and framings, but this should not incline the
reader to conclude that my argument is that they only have rhetorical
significance. Hopefully, the synergistic relationship between the
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46510-9_6
200 C. Miles
rhetorical and the conceptual significance of systems approaches in S-D

logic will become more obvious as my analysis proceeds.
First, let us consider what we actually mean when we talk about ‘sys-
tems theory’ and ‘cybernetics’. Both of these areas of study are strongly
interdisciplinary and tightly entwined with each other at various points
of their development. They both have their origins in a twentieth-century
intellectual engagement with earlier mathematical and engineering work
on feedback mechanisms, or what Richardson (1999) calls “the loop con-
cept” (p. 32). Cybernetics was born “in the late 1940s and early 1950s
when interdisciplinary teams of scientists came to the Macy Foundation
meetings to share their expertise in an effort to find synergetic solutions
to unsolved technical problems” (Duffy, 1984, p. 33). The Macy confer-
ences were held under the general rubric of “Circular Causal and Feedback
Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems” (Umpleby, 2015) and they
were attended by mathematicians, engineers, psychologists, philosophers,
and social scientists, notable amongst these being Norbert Wiener,
Warren McCulloch, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Paul
Lazarsfeld, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Ross Ashby, and Heinz von
Foerster. The general cross-disciplinary discussions that occurred around
the significance of the feedback loop as a basic feature of purposive con-
trol in animal and machine systems led to a burgeoning and creative
application of the concept in many areas. After the publication of Wiener’s
book, Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine, in 1948, the title of the Macy meetings was changed to include
the word ‘cybernetics’ at its head, indicating a clear sense that the dispa-
rate perspectives on causal loops and feedback were being brought
together under the aegis of this new discipline (Umpleby, 2005). However,
what initially looked like a galvanising movement of common enquiry
soon transformed into fragmentation and siloisation. Although many of
the Macy participants continued with influential work in areas such as
artificial intelligence, systems engineering, communication theory, family
therapy and psychiatry, biology, political science, management, social
theory and many others, that work was often not described by the
researchers as cybernetics and when it was that descriptor often caused
more confusion than recognition and illumination. Gregory Bateson’s
(2000) work on schismogenesis is a good example of highly influential
6 The Rhetoric of Emerging Systems 201
research that came directly from his participation at the Macy confer-
ences, yet when cited and discussed its foundations in cybernetics tend to
be ignored or downplayed. Similarly, the work on complex adaptive sys-
tems that came out of the Santa Fe Institute rarely acknowledged the
cybernetics and systems theory that provided its foundations (Umpleby,
2005). Cybernetics, in other words, did not develop into a discipline that
commanded much recognition or, from a rhetorical perspective, much
ethos. As Umpleby (2005) notes, the unifying, cross-disciplinary promise
of cybernetics never materialised because after the Macy conferences
“people stayed in their home disciplines” and the “educational programs
that were established did not survive in discipline-oriented universities”
(p. 64). Accordingly, although the Macy conferences on cybernetics were
influential across many disciplines, those disciplines tended to develop
their cybernetics-inspired research in different ways, with different
emphases, lexicons, and methodologies.
One of those areas of differentiated development was general system
theory (GST), an approach initially outlined by von Bertalanffy (1950,
1951), but strongly galvanised by work emerging at the Mental Health
Research Institute (MHRI) at the University of Michigan, under the
direction of James Miller, whose 1978 book, Living Systems was an ency-
clopaedic (it’s over 1000 pages) attempt to connect a vast array of natural
and social systems together in a common conceptual framework. Miller’s
work was used in Schumacher’s (1986) book on management systems
that was discussed briefly in Chap. 4 as a grounding for Kiel et al. (1992)
and is also cited in that paper. The MHRI also hosted two other impor-
tant names in the development of general systems theory: Anatol
Rapoport, a game theorist, and Kenneth Boulding (the founder of evolu-
tionary economics whose work is also cited in Kiel et al., 1992). Other
forms in which the early ideas of cybernetics and systems thinking later
manifested themselves include the work of the MIT Systems Dynamics
group, led by Jay Forrester whose (1971) World Dynamics sought a sys-
tems approach to achieving a stable world equilibrium. Forrester’s think-
ing has been successfully promulgated under the general title of ‘systems
thinking’ by his mentees, Donella Meadows (2011) and, perhaps more
famously in management and marketing circles, Peter Senge (1994), for
202 C. Miles
whom systems thinking functions as a core component of his Fifth

Discipline.
Cybernetics and systems approaches were also very important in the
early development of operations research and systems approach to man-
agement (i.e. Churchman, 1968; Ackoff & Emery, 1972). Stafford Beer’s
management cybernetics, heavily influenced by the work of British cyber-
netics pioneer and Macy participant, Ross Ashby, saw significant success
in the 1960s, finally leading to an invitation to Beer in 1971 from the
Chilean government of Allende to help design a computer-aided cyber-
netic system to run the Chilean state-owned industrial sector. Never
completed, due to Allende’s assassination and Pinochet’s coup, what
became known as the Cybersyn project was an attempt to instantiate
Beer’s ‘viable systems model’ at the national level “so that down at the
level of the workers it was as self-correcting as it could be” (Richardson,
1999, p. 186).
There are many other streams of research across the last seventy years
that have been influenced by the confluence of intellectual energy that
occurred at the Macy conferences. Excellent overviews of the relation-
ships between these streams can be found in the work of Richardson
(1999), Umpleby (2005, 2015), Umpleby and Dent (1999), and Cope
and Kalantzis (2022) amongst others. For the purposes of the current
analysis, however, I wish to consider the potential rhetorical value of sys-
tems theory and cybernetics for scholarship in marketing. How might the
basic concepts found in this type of thinking about the natural and social
world be of persuasive value in marketing? Answers to this question will
then allow us to move on to considering how elements from systems
theory might be rhetorically functioning in the specific development of
S-D logic foundational discourse.
Systems & Cybernetics Concepts

So, what are the basic conceptual elements of the systems theory approach
that might make it attractive to marketing scholars? The subtitle to
Wiener’s (1948) book gives a useful indication of the principle concerns
of cybernetics, namely the study of (indeed, the science of ) “control and
communication in the animal and the machine”. In the words of Pask

(1968), the cybernetician’s “object of study is a system, either constructed,
or so abstracted from a physical assembly, that it exhibits interaction
between the parts, whereby one controls another, unclouded by the phys-
ical character of the parts themselves” (p. 15.). Accordingly, this process
involves adopting “so far as possible, an attitude which lays emphasis
upon those characteristics of a physical assembly which are common to
each discipline and ‘abstracts’ them in to [the cyberneticist’s] ‘system’”
(ibid., p. 17). Due to this ‘abstracting’ process, cybernetics “can legiti-
mately examine such diverse assemblies as genes in a chromosome, the
contents of books in a library (with respect to information storage), ideas
in brains, government and computing machines (with respect to the
learning process)” (ibid., p. 16). Across all such systems, the cyberneticist
(or systems thinker) uses the system abstraction to consider how the
‘parts’ relate to each other through communication, how they use com-
munication to control for particular goals (such as equilibrium, and
growth), how feedback and feed forward are used to reach those goals,
and how order and purposive behaviour emerge from those feed-
back loops.
Senge (1994) uses the natural example (not metaphor, note) of a storm
to portray the advantage we get from thinking in systems. We see clouds
forming, and the sky darkening, and note the wind rising and “we know
that it will rain”, and we also know “that after the storm, the runoff will
feed into the groundwater miles away, and the sky will grow clear by
tomorrow” (p. 6). All these things are part of the “system of a rain-
storm”—they might be “distant in time and space” from each other, “yet
they are all connected within the same pattern” and we can only really
understand the rainstorm “by contemplating the whole, not any indi-
vidual part of the pattern”(ibid., p. 7). Meadows (2011), as equally rooted
in the System Dynamics tradition as Senge but with a slightly different
lexicon, explains that, “a system is an interconnected set of elements that
is coherently organised in a way that achieves something” (p. 11). Once
more, we see that a system has three components, then—“elements,
interconnections, and a function or purpose” (ibid.). Yet, the systems
approach is not one focused on simply disassembling a system into its
parts to ‘see how it works’—systems thinking recognises that “a system is
204 C. Miles
more than the sum of its parts”. The interconnections between the parts
enable behaviour to emerge that is not innate to the parts themselves.
This means that, “systems can change, adapt, respond to events, seek
goals, mend injuries, and attend to their own survival in lifelike ways,
though they may contain or consist of nonliving things” (p. 12). The
basic process that allows such behaviour is the feedback mechanism.
Feedback is the process that connects elements with functions or pur-
poses. Consequently, as Meadows puts it, “systems thinkers see the world
as a collection of ‘feedback processes’” (ibid., p. 25). Using the language
of ‘stocks’ and ‘flows’, which has become the standard pedagogical lexi-
con for teaching System Dynamics, Meadows (2011) explains that a
stock is “a store, a quantity, an accumulation of material or information
that has built up over time” (p. 18) and it is the “foundation of any sys-
tem”, The “flow” is what changes a stock over time, “filling and draining,
births and deaths, purchases and sales, growth and decay, deposits and
withdrawals, successes and failures” (ibid.). At its most simple, a feedback
loop is created “when changes in a stock affect the flows into or out of
that same stock” (p. 25). There are two different types of feedback loop,
one is a loop that seeks to balance the system at a particular goal point
(think of a thermostat set to 23 degrees Celsius increasing the flow of hot
air into a room until the stock of air in the room reaches that desired
temperature), the other is a reinforcing loop that simply seeks to enhance
“whatever direction of change is imposed on it” (p. 31).
These are the basic building block concepts across cybernetics and sys-
tems theory. Of course, things can get more nuanced when we begin to
think about how systems are so often made up of other systems, so we
begin to talk about hierarchies of systems (and hierarchies of goals) and
emergent properties of systems. What we can call the environment of a
system can be defined as “the set of all objects a change in whose attri-
butes affect the system and also those objects whose attributes are changed
by the behaviour of the system” (Hall & Fagan, 1956, p. 20), but a
moment’s consideration will enable us to see that “objects belonging to
one subsystem may well be considered as part of the environment of
another subsystem” (ibid.). This brings us to another core distinction in
systems thinking, that between closed and open system. Closed systems
are systems that do not exchange anything with their environment (such
as in the case of a chemical reaction occurring in a sealed container, to use

Hall and Fagan’s example). Open systems, on the other hand, are open to
their environment—they are involved in the exchange of “materials,
energies, or information” (ibid.) with that environment and thus can be
characterised as “adapting to or goal seeking in its environment” (Buckley,
1971, p. 193). The vast majority of systems that those in the life and
social sciences are interested in are, naturally, open systems, and
Watzlawick et al. (1967) argue that the distinction between these two
forms of system “freed the sciences concerned with life-phenomenon
from the shackles of a theoretical model based essentially on classical
physics and chemistry: a model of exclusively closed systems” (p. 122).
The final systems concept that I will mention here is that of self-
organisation. Meadows (2011) explains that “the most stunning thing
living systems and some social systems can do is to change themselves
utterly by creating whole new structures and behaviors” and she notes
that “in biological systems that power is called evolution” and in “human
economics it’s called technical advance or social revolution” whereas in
“systems lingo it’s called self-organization” (p. 159). We have already seen
the importance of the idea of evolution in S-D logic and, indeed, in the
general history of marketing thought, or, at least, thought about market-
ing thought (see Chaps. 3 and 4). The link between self-organisation and
marketing evolution is something that I will pick up below in more detail.
However, it is worth noting that while self-organisation is an important
concept in cybernetic and systems thought, there is some variation in the
way in which it is conceptualised (see Richardson, 1999, pp. 311–2 for a
good discussion of this). Most noteworthy from our current perspective,
perhaps, is Ashby’s (1962) position that “any dynamic system can be
made to display a variety of arbitrarily assigned ‘parts’ simply by a change
in the observer’s point of view” (p. 260). In this respect, the ‘self-
organisation’ of a system becomes dependent on who is observing the
system (and at what point). This is a perspective that Pask (1968) devel-
ops further, arguing that “the phrase ‘self-organizing system’ entails a rela-
tion between an observer and an assembly [and] it also entails the
observer’s objective (an assembly may be a self-organizing system for one
observer but not another, or for one objective but not another)”
(pp. 47–8). Ashby and Pask’s underlining of the role of the observer in
206 C. Miles
the definition of any system and its organisation provides us with a good
point to transition into a consideration of how the concepts that cyber-
netics and systems thinking concern themselves with might function as
rhetorical strategies.
he Rhetorical Value of Systems Concepts

T
in Marketing
Let us return initially to Wiener’s positioning of cybernetics as the realm
of control and communication in animal and machine. I have argued
elsewhere (Miles, 2010, 2016, 2018) that marketing is deeply enamoured
with the prospect of control—control of demand, control of consumers,
as well as control of the firm (in its fever dreams of ever-widening disci-
plinary scope and professional influence). And marketers are not alone in
this—so many of the early twentieth century’s innovations in mass pro-
duction and distribution concerned themselves with issues of control—
Taylor’s scientific management, quality control, and the control by
market feedback of production flows and resource allocation perfected by
Alfred Sloan at General Motors, to name just a few examples of what
Beniger (1986) calls the “control revolution” that swept through American
business approaches to mass production and distribution from the 1890s
through to the 1940s (see also Fligstein, 1990). However, as Beniger
argues, the final phase of that control revolution was provided by the
“bureaucratic control of mass consumption” (p. 343), which integrated
“the establishment of advertising as a means to stimulate and control
consumption”, with “the other half of the strict control loop, the feed-
back from demand that came to be known as market research” (p. 356).
Beniger’s (1986) characterisation of marketing as the “control of mass
consumption” is redolent of a lot of research that is written by non-
marketers (or, at least non-‘critical marketers’). Packard’s (1980) The
Hidden Persuaders, published originally in 1957, is typical of the contem-
porary perception of what marketing research and marketing communi-
cation were designed to do to the US population. Packard argues that
increasingly manipulative marcoms approaches, such as the use of
Motivational Research and other psychoanalytical frameworks, were

“impelled by difficulties the marketers kept on encountering in trying to
persuade Americans to buy all the products their companies could fabri-
cate” (p. 37). Demand needed to be increased to match increased pro-
duction. And so control of consumer demand through manipulative
messaging (including the whole gamut of branding techniques as well as
supporting public relations efforts) becomes a major concern of the mar-
keting practitioner. A similar pattern is exposed in Ewen’s historical
research into the advertising and PR industries (1996, 2001).
We should also not forget that the bible of marketing pedagogy,
Kotler’s Marketing Management textbook, was until its tenth (Millennium)
edition, subtitled Analysis, Planning, and Control. Indeed, it was integral
to the definition that Kotler had formulated to promote the marketing
management position: “the analysis, planning, implementation, and con-
trol of programs designed to bring about desired exchanges with target
audiences for the purpose of personal or mutual gain” (Kotler & Zaltman,
1971). ‘Control’ here does not directly mean seeking dominance or try-
ing to manipulate—instead, the language comes very much from the
engineering/cybernetic/systems context of ‘controlling for a goal’, or
observing the output of a plan, measuring if it is on target to reach a spe-
cific goal, and if not, loop back and alter some aspect of the plan. Indeed,
“feedback control” is exactly the phrase used in Kotler and Zaltman
(1971, p. 5) to describe this. However, the paper that introduced the
concept of “social marketing” is an illuminating place to examine the
complex way in which the concept of ‘control’ is understood in the con-
text of marketing management. While on the one hand Kotler and
Zaltman (1971) use the word in its feedback sense (i.e. measuring whether
a goal is being reached), in expanding on the differences between social
advertising and social marketing they then introduce a use of the word
within the context of manipulation/domination. So, they discuss
Lazarsfeld and Merton’s (1949) study of the effectiveness of propaganda
over mass media and describe how “Lazarsfeld and Merton took excep-
tion with the view of many people that mass media can easily be used to
control people’s minds” (Kotler & Zaltman, 1971, p. 5), noting that the
authors identified three conditions for the effectiveness of any propa-
ganda campaign using mass media (monopolisation of the mass media by
208 C. Miles
the propaganda source, an existing attitudinal base that can be taken

advantage of, and supplementation of the propaganda message with fol-
low-up grass roots messaging). Kotler and Zaltman (1971) then go on to
argue that, while monopolisation is very rare in most marketing environ-
ments, their conception of social marketing both meets the criteria of
supplementation while also demonstrating that, although an existing
favourable attitudinal base is desirable it is by no means necessary as busi-
nesses do commonly have to engage in “reshaping basic attitudes” (p. 6).
In other words, as part of their promotion of the social marketing enter-
prise, Kotler and Zaltman (1971) take pains to show how it can meet or
side-step the criteria needed to “control people’s minds”. So, there is a
clear sense here in which marketing efforts for social causes are being
promoted as having the capacity to control the target audiences they are
directed at. Finally, there is a further sense in which the paper uses the
concept of control—and that is in the repeated use of the phrase “control
variables” (p. 7) to describe the four elements of the marketing mix that
can be used by the marketer to manage a campaign. This phrasing is con-
fusing when one considers the fact that a control variable in an experi-
ment should be one that does not change (i.e. is not manipulated by the
experimenter). Kotler and Zaltman (1971) here seem to be rhetorically
confounding the mathematical/statistical connotations of the meaning of
‘control variable’ with the more engineering/cybernetic meaning of a
variable that you control in order to reach a goal point. This usage por-
trays the approach of the marketing manager as one based upon the
action of control—they strategically ‘control’ each of the four variables of
the marketing mix.
Kotler and Zaltman’s (1971) multiple uses of ‘control’ underline for us
how important the word (and its cluster of concepts) is for the project of
marketing management. Given that it is very much a promotional paper
(it argues for the usefulness of the social marketing concept with the aim
of widening its adoption amongst the readers of the journal), it is fair to
conclude that the authors consider the polysemic connotations of the
word important for the persuasive reception of their ideas. Control has
this discursive power because it can be used to connote the highly valo-
rised mathematico-scientific frame of reference that the majority of mar-
keting scholars aspire to in their work, the mechanico-functionalist
engineering/cybernetic traditions of control systems and control feed-

back, as well as the alluring idea of control of the consumer’s thinking
and behaviour. It does heavy rhetorical work, then.
Scully (1996) has convincingly demonstrated how “marketing thought
and practice in the first three decades of the twentieth century were
affected by the cultural symbolism of the engineer and the methodology
of engineering” (p. 70). One of the key engineering metaphors that he
locates in advertising during this period is that of the system. Scully (1996)
notes that “the word system came to marketing from scientific manage-
ment and the manufacturing environment” (p. 77). He notes its use in
copywriting for adverts selling “cabinets for filing and other functional
applications”, as well as in an early ad for a magazine actually called,
System, which “extolled the need for businessmen to consider issues of
systemization, factory organization, system in selling, and advice from
system experts” (ibid.). The idea of a system, and the advantage that we
might achieve by seeing things as systems, are things that were already
being seen as attractive by marketers and business in these early decades
of the twentieth century. The word brings with it connotations of engi-
neering efficiency and a heightened scientific understanding of the busi-
ness and social world. These are associations that will carry forward into
the reception of cybernetic and systems thought, and will enable the idea
of a ‘marketing system’ to be received positively and credibly.
Describing something as a ‘system’ implies the possession of a special-
ist knowledge and understanding of its elements and the connections
between those elements from which its nature emerges. It carries with it
a sense of informed prestige that comes initially from the word’s engi-
neering heritage but as the twentieth century progresses, begins to take
on further connotations connected to the more rarefied, but scientifically
progressive realm of the new post-WWII systems and cybernetics
advancements.
There is something more fundamentally alluring about the idea of ‘sys-
tem’, though, that goes beyond any sense of its engineering or progressive
scientific connotations. I think the core of its attraction can be teased out
by returning to the role of the observer in delineating the system that was
referred to by Ashby and Pask. The role of the observer in making the
distinction between system and environment is also fundamental to
210 C. Miles
Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory, highly influential in European

thinking on the social sciences in the last quarter of the twentieth century
(Moeller, 2006). Luhmann (1990) defines observation as “an operation
that uses distinctions to designate something” (p. 68) and argues that all
knowledge begins with the making of a distinction between a system and
its environment. Considering this from a rhetorical perspective, the act of
system distinguishing is a fascinating variation of metonymic thinking.
Recall (from Chaps. 2 and 3) that metonymy is a rhetorical trope in
which we use something that is associated with a thing in order to ‘stand
for’ that thing, transferring “the name of a thing to something else that is
closely associated with it—such as cause and effect, container and con-
tained, possessor and possessed, and so on” (Bredin, 1984, p. 45). In
comparison to the figure of metaphor, which substitutes things from dif-
ferent semantic fields, metonymy deals with substitutions from within
the same semantic field. What are we to make of the word ‘system’,
though? We have seen how it can be interpreted as an engineering word
and how the connotations of efficiency, automation, and superior, empir-
ical understanding of the workings of something can be metaphorically
carried over into realms such as running a business and buying office
furniture. However, surely, systems theory conceptually transitions from
a metaphorical to a metonymic state? Everything is either a system or an
environment. We can analyse a bathtub, a football match, a newspaper, a
human eye, a marriage, an ant colony as systems. In conferring the name
‘system’ upon each of these things we elect to see them in a particular way,
in an abstracted way that focuses on elements, interconnections, goal set-
ting, loops, subsystems, and emergent behaviours. Calling something a
system, therefore, brings to the surface an aspect of its nature (we might
argue the fundamental aspect of its nature) that was there but was not
fully apprehended until we called it a system. If we call a bathtub a system
it is not the case that ‘system’ is being used as a metaphor, because ‘system’
is not semantically alien to the idea of a bathtub (precisely because ‘sys-
tem’ is such a broad, overarching concept). However, it does call to our
attention the fact that the bathtub is a system—partakes of ‘system-
ness’—and this causes us to see it in a new way (or perhaps reminds us to
see it in this way). ‘System’ becomes a universal metonymy. Or, indeed a
universal synecdoche, as we have previously discussed the part-for-whole/
whole-for-part substitution is seen (in some traditions) as the realm of

the synecdoche (though Lakoff & Johnson’s 2003 collapse of the distinc-
tion certainly makes life easier).
So, the idea of system is the ultimate ‘whole-for-part’ gambit. In distin-
guishing something as a system we metonymically remind our audience of
the abstraction that underlies its specific instantiation, it reminds them to
apprehend it as an assemblage of elements and interconnections, and sug-
gests that we can understand something fundamentally powerful about it
by doing so. In Chap. 3, I suggested that metonymy is often connected
with ‘magical thinking’. In the case of how the concept of ‘system’ might
function metonymically, I would suggest that it promises a perspective, a
way of seeing, normally hidden to us (occulted, one might say, by our
fragmented, overly specific view of the world around us), but one that
also carries with it connotations of scientific and engineering efficiency.
Such a term is a valuable resource in persuasive attempts to offer a new
view of something that might offer to ‘arm’ the audience with secret
knowledge underlying reality. This is the same sort of gambit that much
Hermetic or occult writing uses, after all—‘there is a secret order to the
world that I can show you and you can use it to understand the world
more truly and make your way in it more effectively’. This is not to down-
play the tremendous insight that systems and cybernetics provide us
with—but rather to note the rhetorical potential for some of their basic
terminology and concepts. It can, perhaps, also help explain some of the
peaks and troughs in the general intellectual appreciation of these inter-
disciplinary traditions.
Having touched on some of the rhetorical potential, then, of systems
theory and cybernetics, let us move on to a fuller exploration of how they
have featured in marketing thought so that we can then contextualise the
significance of S-D logic’s move towards a systems orientation.
Systems Theory in Marketing Thought

For those marketing scholars who look upon the discipline’s history as a
source of enlightenment and insight it will come as no surprise that sys-
tems theory has played a not insignificant role in the development of
212 C. Miles
marketing thought. Beside me on my desk I have the imposing presence

of Fisk’s (1967) Marketing Systems: An Introductory Analysis, almost 800
pages of General Systems Theory enthusiastically applied to the chal-
lenges of marketing, and a good example of the extent to which systems
approaches have been part of marketing scholarship. In Franke and
Mazanec’s (2006) paper on the “six identities of marketing”, they provide
seven examples of previous attempts to “systematize the marketing disci-
pline” (an interesting choice of words, of course) and three of those
(Carman, 1980; Fisk & Meyers, 1982; Sheth et al., 1988) place GST or
systems approaches as important schools of thought in marketing theory
development. Dixon and Wilkinson (1984), furthermore, draw a very
clear connection between GST (or General Living Systems Theory, as
they describe it using von Bertalanffy’s early wording) and the Aldersonian
functionalist paradigm of marketing that grew out of the “scientific ‘cri-
sis’” in the discipline in the late 1940s and early 1950s. They note
Alderson’s contribution to a 1949 AMA symposium was focused on
explicating his suggestion for understanding marketing in terms of “orga-
nized behaviour systems”, that are made up of sub-systems, intercon-
nected via communication, and whose “operational behaviour” can be
characterised by their inputs and outputs. As Dixon and Wilkinson
(1984) summarise, “emphasis is placed upon the problems of system sur-
vival and the system’s adjustments to its environment” (p. 41). It is strik-
ing to realise that as the Macy Conferences were getting into full swing,
so also were marketing scholars beginning to engage with the fundamen-
tal concepts and perspectives that early cybernetics and system theory
were exploring. Dixon and Wilkinson (1984) explain that, “as General
Living Systems Theory developed during the early 1950s, its correspon-
dence to Alderson’s approach became more apparent”, and then they
quote a paper by Ross Ashby to demonstrate the similarity of language
and concerns. The functionalist school of marketing “as advocated by
Alderson is heavily dependent on systems thinking and analysis” (Sheth
et al., 1988, p. 166). However, its rather idiosyncratic terminology, “lack
of simplicity and empirical content” (ibid., p. 95) meant that, in combi-
nation with Alderson’s early death in 1965, the functionalist school and
its systems orientation lost mindshare in the discipline. However, as
Dixon and Wilkinson (1984) argue, Alderson’s legacy as a system thinker
in marketing has served as a reminder of ‘what might be’, an alternative

to the marketing management paradigm that many feel ended up domi-
nating mainstream scholarship from the 1970s onward.
While Alderson’s functionalist interpretation of systems theory was
not broadly adopted by other scholars, the fascination with systems
approaches did continue. Sheth et al. (1988) note that by 1967 the theme
of the “entire [AMA] conference was ‘Changing Marketing Systems’”,
and for several years afterwards “‘systems’ was a common noun in paper
titles and at least one marketing textbook was called Marketing Systems”
(p. 162). Nevertheless, a clearly identifiable “stream of research” on mar-
keting systems is difficult to discern, as Sheth et al. (1988) point out. One
of the reasons for this might be concomitant to that already advanced by
Umpleby (2005) in regards to the development of cybernetics and sys-
tems theory themselves—namely, that the perspectives are so interdisci-
plinary that a critical mass of scholars working within one particular area
never seem to emerge. Systems theory, by its very nature, encourages its
application everywhere but that can manifest itself as many scholars
working with systems approaches, but across many different areas that
rarely connect in terms of supporting intellectual communities. An addi-
tional reason is the challenge implicit in doing empirical research on sys-
tems, particularly given that “the publish or perish environment in which
many researchers find themselves makes it difficult to devote the large
block of time necessary to engage in acceptable systems research” (Sheth
et al., 1988, p. 171). Accordingly, while Sheth et al. (1988) identify a
variety of individual research outputs investigating either what they term
‘macroscopic’ and ‘microscopic marketing systems’, these never coalesce
into a unified research stream that those working in the discipline might
broadly recognise as a school of marketing thought. Therefore, while “in the
mid-1960s, systems were thought to be one of the most important tends
in marketing courses” (Sheth et al., 1988, p. 170), that promise never
materialised. Despite this, Sheth et al. (1988) evaluate the potential of
the systems perspective on marketing very highly, stating that, “it holds
great promise for the advancement of marketing as a discipline” (p. 173).
One significant force that has been important in trying to bring that
promise to fruition is the research area of macromarketing, particularly in
the scholarship of Roger Layton (vide Schultz, 2012 and Layton, 2019).
214 C. Miles
Hunt’s (1981) definition of macromarketing in his invited piece for the

first issue of the Journal of Macromarketing, has been the one generally
promulgated by Layton and it is clearly systems-oriented at its core: mac-
romarketing “refers to the study of (1) marketing systems, (2) the impact
and consequences of marketing systems on society, and (3) the impact
and consequences of society on marketing systems” (p. 8). The identifica-
tion of the systems approach with a macro perspective on marketing was
something that Hunt had already discussed in his seminal paper on “The
Nature and Scope of Marketing” (Hunt, 1976) where he recognised the
important application of systems theory to marketing that had occurred
in the 1960s. It is also worth noting that “systems theory” or “marketing
systems” occur in 5 out of 8 of the sectors by which Hunt (1976) catego-
rises the scope of marketing. The establishment of the Journal of
Macromarketing, however, certainly looks like a moment of important
confluence for the intellectual forces contributing to systems approaches
in marketing. Not only does the first issue contain Hunt’s strongly
systems-oriented definition of macromarketing, but the editor of the
journal was George Fisk, doyen of one particular stream of marketing
systems work, who explains in his “Invitation to Participate in Affairs of
the Journal of Macromarketing” that “the word macromarketing implies
that we care about the consequences of large marketing systems on large
social issues” (Fisk, 1981, p. 3). Furthermore, there are two papers
(White, 1981; Layton, 1981) whose approach is entirely based in systems
theory. Layton’s (1981) paper, comparing trade flows in the marketing
systems of Australia and the US, mentions Alderson and Fisk (amongst
others) as early contributors to marketing systems thought and notes that
“in one way or another the study of flows in marketing systems has been
a recurring theme in the literature of marketing for many years” (p. 35).
It is worth acknowledging in passing the inclusion of another paper in
the first issue of the journal, authored by Laczniak et al. (1981); while the
paper does not adopt a systems approach in its exploration of attitudes
towards advertising use in social marketing campaigns it is interesting to
see Lusch as a co-author in this systems-supportive environment.
The role of the Journal of Macromarketing as a supportive venue for
marketing scholarship engaging in systems approaches was clearly set
from its first issue and ‘how markets and marketing systems operate’
remains at the top of its indicative list of topics in its ‘Journal Description’
(Sage, 2023). However, perhaps the most important part it has played in
promoting the systems perspective is as a venue for what Shultz (2012)
has enthusiastically called “Layton’s Ring Cycle”, a series of four “field-
shaping, award-wining articles” (p. 191) that place systems theory at the
core of the macromarketing project; Layton and Grossbart (2006),
Layton (2007), Layton (2008), and Layton (2009). These papers, along
with Layton (2011, 2015a, 2015b, 2019) and Layton and Duffy (2018),
form a comprehensive systems theory of marketing systems.
Layton’s ‘working definition’ of a marketing system has remained
somewhat consistent in general form since these early papers though
some significant aspects of its wording have changed and it is illuminat-
ing to quickly examine the nature of this transformation here. One of the
first renditions (Layton, 2007, p. 230) runs: “A marketing system is a
network of individuals, groups, and/or entities linked directly or indi-
rectly through sequential or shared participation in economic exchange
that creates, assembles, transforms, and makes available assortments of
products, both tangible and intangible, provided in response to customer
demand” (Layton, 2007, p. 230). The basic elements of systems thought
that we have identified above are present in this formulation—a system
consisting of interconnected elements that has a purpose. The elements
of the system are individuals, groups, and entities; the interconnections
would seem to take the form of the flow of assortments between these
elements; and the purpose would be exchange in response to consumer
demand. In 2011, Layton amended this definition to “a network of indi-
viduals, groups and/or entities, embedded in a social matrix, linked
directly or indirectly through sequential or shared participation in eco-
nomic exchange, which jointly and/or collectively creates economic value
with and for customers, through the offer of assortments of goods, ser-
vices, experiences and ideas, that emerge in response to or anticipation of
customer demand” (2011, p. 259). Here we see the explicit identification
of the ‘social matrix’ as the environment for any marketing system—
implying that marketing systems are themselves always subsystems within
larger social systems. We also see that value has been placed squarely in
Layton’s description of the marketing system, though it is qualified as
‘economic value’. Indeed, the repetition of ‘economic’ in this short
216 C. Miles
formulation (“economic exchange” and “economic value”) rather takes

pains to underline that, for Layton, although marketing systems might be
“embedded” within social systems, they are fundamentally purposed
towards economic goals. The reason why any marketing system exists (its
purpose or function) is to respond to consumer demand for assortments
that carry (and so can be exchanged for) economic value.
It is not fanciful to regard Layton’s papers on marketing systems from
2006 onward as representing a sort of renaissance of the topic area in
marketing scholarship. While other scholars have certainly investigated
the potential of systems theory since the 1980s, it is Layton’s work (solo
and as co-author) that has consistently forged the way in seeming to fulfil
the promise for the approach that Sheth et al. (1988) judged it to possess.
It should be noted, of course, that the bulk of that work occurred after
the publication of Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) foundational article on S-D
logic. Indeed, Layton (2008) is a clear response to S-D logic, seeking to
provide “a significant extension to the proposed logic” (p. 218) by embed-
ding it within a systems perspective. Given what we have already seen (in
Chap. 4) with respect to the gradual inclusion of systems approaches
within Vargo and Lusch’s evolving conceptualisations of S-D logic, it will
be interesting to consider Layton’s (2008) paper as a rhetorical foil for
that evolution.
S-D Logic’s (Re)Turn to the System

Layton’s (2008) paper on a system’s extension of S-D logic arrives in the
same year as the first paper where Vargo and Lusch make clear indications
that the future of S-D logic might include some form of systems perspec-
tive. However, before we dive into the relationship between the two
papers, we should examine the rhetorical significance of a slightly earlier
point at which the systems perspective is touched upon by the founders
of S-D logic. In Lusch and Vargo (2006) the authors defend their formu-
lation of S-D logic from the criticism that it was too focused on the
micro, firm level. The origins of this criticism are not explicitly identified
in that chapter but perhaps emanate from Laczniak’s (2006) argument
for a more explicit engagement with macro level issues in the
development of S-D logic, and Wilkie and Moore’s (2006) discussion of

how the logic does not adequately address what they call the “aggregate
marketing system” (p. 267) (both also chapters in the Lusch and Vargo
edited collection on S-D logic). As part of their defence, Lusch and Vargo
(2006) happily acknowledge that “a service-centered model of exchange
motivates the study of marketing at the most micro level, which is entities
exchanging competencies or service(s)” (p. 410). However, they point
out, “this micro-level analysis allows for a more complete understanding
of marketing from a holistic, systems, or macro perspective [because]
macro systems, which undoubtedly should be studied in their own right,
come about or emerge from micro phenomena” (ibid.). This is a bold
argument that does point out a pitfall of general systems approaches,
which is that they can remain focused on the macro level systems rather
than the micro level systems (or subsystems depending on your perspec-
tive) from which they emerge. This is also a line of reasoning that is
repeated by Lusch (2006) in his solo-authored paper on the “small and
long view” that he suggests macromarketing be focused on. Lusch and
Vargo (2006) are strongly implying, in the end, that S-D logic is a better
approach to implementing systems thinking in marketing than the exist-
ing macromarketing one. Crucially, they argue, an effective systems
approach to marketing needs to be realistic about the levels that are cho-
sen to be focused upon. They note that, “systems at higher and higher
levels of aggregation constitute a hierarchy of nested levels […] for
instance, atom, molecule, cell, organism, species, community, ecosystem,
biosphere, cosmos” (p. 410). They then also note that even when we
think of the “individual human organisms” that are involved in the sys-
tems of “human exchange” we should not forget that they too are consti-
tuted by lower levels of nested hierarchies, such as the “particles inside of
the nuclei of atoms, inside of atoms, inside of molecules, inside of nuclei
of cells, inside of cells, inside of tissue, inside of organs, inside of the
human organism” (one recognises, of course, the powerful rhetorical pat-
terning through repetition present in this passage). Highly significantly,
this last point is evidenced via a citation to Kiel et al. (1992)—the article
that we spent some time in Chap. 4 examining as a precursor to Vargo
and Lusch (2004) and that itself contains a markedly grand instantiation
of the systems approach to marketing in the larger systems of the
218 C. Miles
universe. It is one of very few citations in the literature to this paper and
it is being used here to directly stake a claim for a systems legacy for S-D
logic. The citation (and the argument that it is supporting) reminds mac-
romarketers and systems-supporting scholars that one of the founders of
the logic co-authored an article that went further than any other market-
ing systems formulation in attempting to place the exchange paradigm at
the centre of every hierarchical level of the cosmos. But this is not quite
the hubris that it might at first seem—for Lusch and Vargo (2006) are
saying that they have ‘been there and done that’, and they have found
that it is of crucial importance to pick your levels wisely. Yes, we could
look at marketing agents at the cellular or atomic level, just as we can
look at them at the macro societal and cultural level—and all of those
levels are hierarchically arranged and produce emergent properties that
are significant for marketing—but from a marketing perspective, it
makes the most sense to base our systems analysis at the level of the indi-
viduals humans involved in marketing activity.
Now, Lusch and Vargo’s (2006) argument regarding S-D logic’s rela-
tionship to a marketing systems perspective only amounts to a short para-
graph and there is little indication in the rest of their contributions to the
2006 edited collection that they were seriously considering integrating a
more overt systems approach into S-D logic. It does, however, outline
clearly that when feeling pressure around the macro orientation of the
logic they were quickly able to mount a defence that recruited a subtle
argument from authority (well, the ad verecundiam with a touch of ad
antiquitatem) and an even more subtle (though effective) argumentum ad
absurdum, demonstrating that a primary marketing systems focus on any
other of the hierarchical levels other than the individual human threatens
to lead to both macroscopic and microscopic imbalances—therefore,
S-D logic provides “a more complete understanding of marketing”
(p. 410) systems.
Layton’s (2008) article cite’s Lusch and Vargo (2006) but makes no
comment on that article’s defence of S-D logic’s eminent suitability as the
basis for a systems or macro approach to marketing. Instead, Layton
(2008) argues for the embedding of S-D logic “within the wider context
of a marketing system” (p. 222), resulting in what he calls “SESD logic”
or “system-embedded service-dominant logic” (p. 215). Layton (2008)
sees S-D logic as focused on “the reciprocal creation of value through an

exchange transaction” (p. 216) and seeks to demonstrate how it would be
more useful to refocus it “beyond the transaction in which co-production
takes place to focus on the wider marketing system in which a transaction
is embedded” (p. 218). The reasoning here is that “while it is the transac-
tion where the creation of value can be seen most clearly, it is the market-
ing system, where the full range of both primary and secondary effects
transpire, which could or should be at the center of marketing thought”
(ibid.). This is almost the exact opposite line of reasoning used in Lusch
and Vargo (2006). For Layton (2008), marketing exchange transactions
are micro-level phenomena and therefore cannot “yield an understanding
of macro or institutional outcomes” (p. 219), and this in turn means that
the S-D logic with its central focus on exchange transactions cannot
function fully as a “workable worldview of marketing” (ibid.). Layton
then recruits a powerful piece of visual rhetoric to make his point. He
provides a figure that he titles “Mapping Marketing Systems” (p. 221)
which “positions a number of examples on a two dimensional contin-
uum” with two separate perspectives on each axis, the analysis/modelling
level (micro, meso, and macro) and the decision making focus (from
individual, through to group and then society) on the vertical axis and
concentration of goal orientation (purposeful, structured, emergent, and
random) and the nature of a systems interaction basis (power, persuasion,
participation, and presence—one notes the alliteration in passing) on the
vertical axis. Up on the top left hand corner of the figure, there is a dotted
line that sketches out a small box within the larger whole box describing
all of these characteristics. Nowhere in the article is the significance of
that small dotted box explicitly explained—but it covers the small area
that deals with micro levels of analysis, systems that are driven or struc-
tured around shared goals and where the interaction style is based on
power and/or persuasion. Now, someone following along with Layton’s
logic would probably understand that the small dotted box is the area
covered by S-D logic as formulated by Vargo and Lusch (2004) around
it’s micro-level, management-oriented view of exchange transactions. The
rest of the box (by far the larger area) covers all the sorts of things that it
could potentially be used to cover if it adopted a market system orienta-
tion (so, e.g. “peasant markets”, “aggregate marketing systems”, “centrally
220 C. Miles
planned systems”, “open source wiki models”, etc.). The intellectual

threat of comparative conceptual impoverishment is visually quite clear.
In an interesting inversion of Lusch and Vargo’s (2006) rhetorical
strategy, Layton’s (2008) argument then turns to Kiel et al. (1992)!
Layton cites this paper when seeking to prove that there had been a num-
ber of previous voices calling for the need to abandon exchange as the
central focus of a general framework for the study of marketing and
instead adopt a marketing systems orientation. So, Layton points out
that Kiel et al. (1992), “over 10 years ago”, had “revisited earlier studies
of the role of exchange in marketing theory noting that in general these
had failed to incorporate ‘human exchange into a larger intellectual
framework that encompasses the importance of all exchange phenomena’
(p. 60)” (p. 221). As a consequence, Kiel et al. (1992) had therefore sug-
gested, so Layton (2008) continues, that the “concept of exchange”
needed to be placed “within a marketing system where the latter is an
open structure existing in a dynamic equilibrium with its environment,
maintaining structural integrity, and evolving to higher states of com-
plexity through successive stages in repeated cycles over time”
(pp. 221–222). Using the Lusch co-authored paper like this (particularly
given its rhetorical role in Lusch and Vargo’s, 2006, defence of S-D logic’s
macro supremacy) is a boss move worthy of Cicero. For the rest of the
paper, Layton proceeds to argue how a System-Embedded Service-
Dominant logic (SESD) would provide the sort of context and framing
to enable effective engagement with issues such as the institutional envi-
ronment, micro and macro interfaces between the firm and the environ-
ment, the role of marketing in society, system and boundary definitions,
and the relationship between micro and macro levels of strategy. Layton
repeatedly states that SESD would leave Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) for-
mulation of S-D logic “untouched” (p. 26)—everything that the latter
framework brings to the analysis of “marketing in a managerial sense”
(ibid.) remains the same, it is just the by being embedded in a larger mar-
keting systems perspective it becomes “significantly enriched”, and more
able to advance marketing thought on exchange into areas that are unique
to marketing.
In a way, Layton’s argument here is similar to the way in which a num-
ber of other scholars have reacted to S-D logic—namely, by attempting
to subsume it within their own frameworks. This is very much the way
that Shelby Hunt deals with S-D logic, for example, by demonstrating
that it falls inside his own Resource-Advantage Theory (Hunt &
Madhavaram, 2006). Layton’s (2008) specific suggestion of an SESD
logic that subsumes S-D logic has not been received enthusiastically so
far, with only a few adoptions extant in the literature (Thirkell, 2012;
Pecotich et al., 2010, where it is somewhat confusingly referred to along-
side S-D logic). However, Layton’s marketing systems approach to S-D
logic did manifest itself in the first Forum on Markets and Marketing
meeting in 2008, which Layton co-chaired and which was the venue for
the paper that became Layton (2011). Layton himself drops the SESD
branding in the 2008 presentation and 2011 paper. Instead, he openly
takes a leaf out of Vargo and Lusch’s rhetorical playbook and produces a
series of 12 “propositions” “central to a theory of marketing systems”
(Layton, 2011, p. 260). In the abstract to the paper he states that the
propositions are “complementary to those suggested by S-D logic”
(p. 259), but there is no actual discussion of S-D logic in the paper itself.
So, while initially entering the ongoing scholarly debate around the
development of S-D logic that venues such as the Forum represent,
Layton has sought to address its significance less and less in his work so
that by the time of his substantial review of marketing systems (Layton,
2019) S-D logic is not mentioned once. For Layton, then, S-D logic
appears to be largely a dead-end for systems work and even its promo-
tional value (as a term with growing ethos that could be useful to juxta-
pose with marketing systems thinking) palls. Yet, for Vargo and Lusch,
the systems perspective proves increasingly alluring even if Layton’s very
clear sense of the direction that marketing systems thinking should be
going proves less useful as something that can be brought into S-D logic.
Indeed, Layton’s work on the relationship between S-D logic and market-
ing systems makes it obvious that S-D logic would have to sacrifice its
overarching identity to work well with his vision of marketing systems. If
Vargo and Lusch were attracted to the potential of systems thinking for
helping to extend the S-D logic, it might make more sense to find a way
forward that did not so strongly subordinate the system that they had
been building. Let us see how they have managed this.
222 C. Miles
Vargo and Lusch (2008), as discussed in Chap. 4, provide a significant

update to the Foundational Premises of S-D logic. They also provide the
first clear indication that the authors were willing to consider some form
of systems orientation being introduced (or connected) into the S-D
logic framework. In terms of the paper’s engagement with systems theory,
Vargo and Lusch (2008) initially remind us that in the authors’ 2006
edited collection they had already suggested that S-D logic could provide
the basis for “a theory of service systems” (2008, p. 3), thus referencing
the dense paragraph of argumentation that we have already examined
above. However, they immediately then direct the reader to “see also
Maglio and Spohrer in this issue”. This is a reference to Maglio and
Spohrer’s (2008) paper on ‘Fundamentals of Service Science’, a compara-
tively short conceptual paper written by two researchers from the IBM
Almaden Research Center that argues that “service-dominant logic and
service systems will be fundamental to service science” (p. 20). A little
later in Vargo and Lusch (2008), as part of their proof that S-D logic is
not just a management/firm oriented framework, the authors remind the
reader of how they have “been extending the applicability of S-D logic to
all entities that exchange to improve their own state of being (e.g., indi-
viduals, families, firms, societies, nations, etc.)” (p. 5). They then re-
introduce Maglio and Spohrer’s (2008) service system positioning by
informing us that some of this “expanded applicability is occurring in
conjunction with the development of ‘service science’, an industry-led,
university-assisted movement to create a new discipline to study exchange
among ‘service systems’” (Vargo & Lusch, 2008, p. 5). They then quote
the definition of service system from Maglio and Spohrer (2008), noting
that the “service-for-service perspective of S-D logic characterizes the
interaction within and among all of these service systems” (ibid.).
Vargo and Lusch (2008), then, introduces a direct competitor to
Layton’s marketing systems approach—one based squarely on service
relationships and so naturally more ‘ready baked’ for integration with
S-D logic. Furthermore, Maglio and Spohrer’s (2008) conception of
‘service’ is generated directly from a consideration of S-D logic (see
Spohrer et al., 2007, reference 6). Later in the paper, when discussing
the formal introduction of changes to the wording of FP9, Vargo and
Lusch (2008) provide us with a fascinating insight into their persuasive
thinking around the introduction of the ‘service system’ nomenclature

into S-D logic. They admit to a difficulty in finding the correct term for
the “generic resource integrators” (p. 9) described by S-D logic. They
acknowledge, “Clearly, ‘organizations’ is not appropriate because indi-
viduals are resource integrators”, and so “with something less than com-
plete comfort” they fasten upon the term popular with the Industrial
Marketing and Purchasing Group at the time, “actors”. However, they
rather coyly note that “we are not forever committed to that term” (ibid.)
and then propose that an alternative might well be found in Spohrer
et al.’s (2007) “service systems” term, though they “suspect it is not yet
sufficiently familiar to marketing scholars and practitioners” (ibid.). This
is prime rhetorical strategy—choosing words by considering one’s audi-
ence’s familiarity with them (hence their ethos for that audience).
Additionally, we can see that Vargo and Lusch are laying the ground-
work for that future familiarity through their own explication of the
service systems concept and use of Spohrer and Maglio’s work. With this
in mind, we might say that the “service system” perspective has both
rhetorical advantages and disadvantages for Vargo and Lusch. It is not
heavily tied to an existing explication of marketing systems (indeed, it
makes no claims to be carrying on any real form of systems thought
legacy whether from inside or outside of the marketing or management
traditions), which means that it has no researchers with ‘skin in the
game’ in regard to the evolution of marketing thought. The fact that it is
an unknown perspective for the marketing scholar audience provides a
certain novel attraction that can help to grab attention and promote
engagement. But at the same time, given the significant tradition of
marketing system work (via Alderson, Fisk, Layton, etc.) that has evolved
from the general systems theory tradition, some of which Vargo and
Lusch have themselves engaged with and made reference to and included
within their S-D logic developmental dialogues, the sudden adoption of
the unknown “service systems” is a difficult one to convincingly accom-
plish without more groundwork. Finally, the only real ethos amplification
that the “service system” work can provide is via its origins in IBM ser-
vice orientation research efforts—this is not an inconsiderable factor,
though, and can balance the comparative lack (or obfuscation) of aca-
demic legacy.
224 C. Miles
Vargo and Lusch (2008) is an initial salvo in S-D logic’s engagement

with systems as an integrated element. The authors suggest and sketch,
but there is no clear outline of exactly what it might mean. The same is
true of Lusch et al. (2010), a slightly later paper that states the “systemic
nature of value creation” (p. 29) but does not go into detail regarding
what this might mean. The answer, however, does arrive in Vargo and
Lusch (2011). Here, the authors argue that “a systems orientation is
important to both academics and practitioners because it has different
implications for understanding and applying principles of value co-
creation, as is particularly essential in an increasingly interconnected, and
thus increasingly dynamic, world” (p. 182). In explaining the significance
of this for S-D logic, Vargo and Lusch then provide some reasoning that
might strike those familiar with their existing engagement with macro-
marketing and marketing systems as a possible volte face. So, they con-
tinue by admitting that “there is perhaps a certain irony in this position;
it implies that we must move toward a more macro, systemic view of
generic actors in order to see more clearly how a single, specific actor (e.g.
a firm) can participate more effectively” (ibid.). In order to understand
the micro level more effectively, then, we need to begin with a more
macro, systems understanding. Which, surely, is the opposite of what was
argued for in Lusch and Vargo (2006) and, indeed, Lusch (2006)? Is the
“irony” of the position that it is the opposite of what the authors had
seemed to hold in the past? I think this is unclear, but I am not sure from
where else the irony is generated.
The motivation for the change in position would appear to be the per-
ceived need for increasing abstraction in the S-D logic framework. Vargo
and Lusch introduce the systems positioning by returning to the lexicon
issue that they had mentioned towards the close of Vargo and
Lusch (2008), where they had indicated their discomfort with the adop-
tion of the term “actor”. In Vargo and Lusch (2011) all such discomfort
has been abandoned. They have clearly decided upon the actor designa-
tion, and taken it further with the actor-to-actor (A2A) formulation.
They recruit some ethos generation to justify this, noting that Evert
Gummesson “has recently indicated to us that he is adopting” (p. 182)
the same terminology, and also reminding readers that this is the termi-
nology used by the IMP Group. In choosing to speak of actors rather
than of ‘firms’ or ‘consumers’ or ‘stakeholders’, Vargo and Lusch are

extending the S-D logic by increasing its abstraction. And that process of
increasing abstraction also points to “the existence of a much more com-
plex and dynamic system of actors that relationally co-create value and, at
the same time, jointly provide the context through which value gains its
collective and individual assessment” (ibid.). Using different words to
describe a situation, then, leads to insights about the larger systemic
nature of that situation. In changing S-D logic to an A2A lexicon, the
need for a systems perspective comes into focus.
The question of what systems perspective S-D logic is to adopt still
remains, though. While Vargo and Lusch (2008) had largely ignored the
legacy of marketing systems in order to highlight their preferred solution
of the IBM-origin service systems approach, Vargo and Lusch (2011)
does directly address this issue. First, the authors recast the systems
approach that S-D logic requires as “service ecosystem thinking”. The
phrase “service eco-system” had occurred in a footnote in Lusch et al.
(2010) where it is used to gloss the concept of a value network, but in
Vargo and Lusch (2011) it is fully defined and then that definition is
further ‘de-compacted’ in a dense series of “eight key components”
(p. 185). The provision of this new term provides the authors with an ‘in
house’ version of systems theory that they can fully define and control.
The legacy of marketing systems is then dealt with in a rather abrupt
manner that contains an enthymeme so compact that it is difficult to
reconstruct the elided secondary proposition. Vargo and Lusch (2011)
first note that there has “fortunately” been “a significant amount of activ-
ity in business and social scholarship that can contribute in various ways
to thinking about markets as systems, as implied by S-D logic” (ibid.).
They then mention Alderson’s work and describe it as a “close cousin of
the general systems approach” and then note Layton’s “more recent” work
on marketing systems. Even though both Alderson and Layton’s systems
approaches have used “what might be considered something like a G-D
logic framework” they are both “easily portable to, and arguably enriched
by and enriching of an S-D logic orientation” (ibid.). Leaving aside the
rather dubious (even though highly hedged) claim that Layton’s work uses
a goods-dominant logic, at this point, a reader would be forgiven for
thinking that in the eyes of Vargo and Lusch the contributions of Alderson
226 C. Miles
and Layton will provide a powerful (if adapted) framework for S-D log-
ic’s service ecosystem positioning. But the reader would be mistaken. The
next paragraph then states, “Clearly, the scholarly activity with the most
potential for development of a systems approach to understanding the
market and application for marketing is that associated with IBM’s effort
to create a science of service” (ibid.). The “clearly” is very much a logical
non sequitur here and is being used to do a lot of rhetorical heavy lifting,
giving the implication of a train of reasoning when there is not one pres-
ent. If the reader were to try to reconstruct the argumentation, I think the
only possibility that could be advanced is that because the IBM service
science has the word service in it, it is a better approach to S-D logic
service systems than the historical legacy of marketing systems, which are
apparently tainted by a G-D orientation (stated, not argued for).
Vargo and Lusch (2011) attempts to formally ‘on board’ systems think-
ing to the S-D logic framework while attempting to control the influence
of the marketing systems legacy and the alternative S-D logic systems
conceptual work performed by Layton, in particular. This might make
good strategic sense. As the development of S-D logic begins to favour
more and more abstracted thinking about value exchange and co-creation,
a system perspective will inevitably appear to be an important one to
integrate, somehow, into the logic. Yet, the legacy of systems thinking in
marketing has been somewhat problematic—there is no obvious existing
turnkey framework that would appeal to the current marketing scholar
audience base or that would not threaten to subsume SD logic within it.
The accusation of using a “G-D logic framework” made against both
Alderson and Layton functions to cut them out of consideration for a
S-D logic oriented systems solution—and it also makes them rather ‘old-
fashioned’ (with the lumping of Layton alongside Alderson increasing
that impression of the former’s work). There is no recognition of Layton’s
(2008) offering regarding the Systems-Embedded Service Dominant
logic. Instead, as per the initial messaging in Vargo and Lusch (2008), the
service systems work of Maglio and Spohrer (2008) is advanced as the
path down which S-D logic’s service orientation shall develop. The syn-
ergy between the two frameworks is made clear through a recognition
that Maglio and Spohrer have “suggested that S-D logic is foundational
to the development of service science” (Vargo & Lusch, 2011, p. 185).
This is immediately paired with the quid pro quo of “service science has
the potential to provide an organizing umbrella under which all of the
business-as-systems work could be organized” (ibid.). In other word,
there is a balanced relationship between the two frameworks and this is
the logic that makes service science acceptable as a partner to S-D logic.
It is useful to quickly examine two responses to Vargo and Lusch
(2011), both published alongside that article in Industrial Marketing
Management journal. The first comes from Sheth (2011) and is titled
‘Reflections on Vargo and Lusch’s systems perspective’. As might be
expected from his article’s title, Sheth picks out Vargo and Lusch’s state-
ment that, as he puts it “marketing is and should be viewed from a systems
perspective”, to which he adds “and I agree” (Sheth, 2011, p. 197).
Immediately, however, Sheth highlights the historic legacy of marketing
systems, reminding us that the “systems perspective was a major concep-
tual initiative in the sixties leading up to what Sheth et al. (1988) referred
to as a separate school of thought” (p. ibid.). He then explicitly mentions
Forrester’s MIT tradition of systems thought as a force in the seventies.
Sheth then concludes by stating that, “a systems perspective has the high-
est potential to elevate marketing from a practice to a discipline” (ibid.).
This is a powerful endorsement for Vargo and Lusch’s shift to a systems
perspective for S-D logic, of course. It almost gives the impression that
the moment has now arrived for the potential of the perspective stated in
Sheth et al. (1988) to be realised. Though, it is noticeable that Sheth
(2011) does not actually endorse the manner of Vargo and Lusch’s imple-
mentation of a systems perspective—he does not mention their adoption
of the service science framework, but he also does not mention their
discarding of the marketing systems legacy (the legacy he takes explicit
pains to remind the reader of ). There is clear enthusiasm for Vargo and
Lusch’s adoption of the systems perspective, but far less clear sentiment
regarding the way they have done so. It is noticeable, though, that the
advice he has to give does not obviously cover the service science frame-
work. In order to be successful in implementing a systems perspective,
Sheth (2011) says we must “unlearn our scientific traditions anchored to
mechanics and physics as well as traditional theories of economics and
behavioral sciences”, instead “embracing evolutionary and biological sci-
ence perspectives with a focus more on the context of discovery and less
228 C. Miles
on the context of justification” (p. 197). This could be read as a critique

of the IBM-origined service science perspective and the way that Vargo
and Lusch have used it to side-line Layton (himself heavily inspired by
advances in economics scholarship). It can also be read as a nod back to
Miller’s (1978) living systems work.
The second response to Vargo and Lusch (2011) I wish to note is
authored by Spohrer (2011), a co-author of the service system framework
that Vargo and Lusch had been engaging with since 2008. Spohrer (2011)
states that “the S-D logic of marketing in my view provides an opportu-
nity to strengthen and update historic strands of earlier systems thinking
in marketing” (p. 199), though he noticeably does not cite any such ear-
lier strands. While one would expect Spohrer (who has by 2011 already
co-written a number of times with Vargo) to endorse the systems perspec-
tive positioning formally announced by Vargo and Lusch (2011), there
are two points of disagreement and they both focus on the lexical choices
made by the founders of S-D logic. Firstly, Spohrer (2011) notes in a
footnote on the first page of the article that while Vargo and Lusch have
chosen to use the terms “actors” and “generic actors” in their systems
framework, actually “the term ‘entity’ appears to be more prevalent in the
systems science literature” and “we prefer the term ‘abstract entity’ over
‘generic actor’ but the two terms can be used interchangeably (Spohrer &
Maglio, 2010)” (p. 199). It is difficult to tell whether the ‘we’ here is the
‘we’ of objective science reporting, the ‘we’ of Spohrer and Maglio (2010),
or the broader ‘we’ of ‘IBM researchers on service science’. The same pat-
tern continues at the end of the paper where, although temporarily
adopting one lexical choice of Vargo and Lusch (2011), Spohrer takes
issue with another. He first states that, “the starting-point concept in
service science is the ecology of generic actors”, but then continues, “we
prefer the term ecology over ecosystem to emphasize that populations of
entities come and go” (Spohrer, 2011, p. 200). The reasoning for this
lexical difference is that “one measure of the robustness, resilience, and
health of the ecology is their diversity” (ibid.), and, presumably the word
ecology connotes this far more effectively than ecosystem (though, again,
the reasoning is somewhat opaque).
Taking both Sheth (2011) and Spohrer (2011) pieces into account we
can see that issues of word choice and the management of historical
legacy feature as important components of scholar response to Vargo and

Lusch (2011). Now, of course, I am not dealing in reader response analy-
sis in this study—a rhetorical approach focuses in on the texts in question
and seeks to uncover how they might be constructed to persuade their
audience. However, Sheth (2011) and Spohrer (2011) both help to indi-
cate that historical legacy and lexicon are points of tension in the rhetori-
cal argumentation provided by Vargo and Lusch (2011). My engagement
with the text has tended to focus on just those two areas and I think that
is because they are the principle sites of rhetorical gambit in Vargo and
Lusch’s gradual movement to incorporate a systems perspective in S-D
logic. They are searching for a lexicon that is complementary to the exist-
ing choices they have made in S-D logic, but that does not provide too
much conceptual leakage out to other frameworks whose development
they cannot control easily. An allied point to this is that they need to deal
with the historical legacy of systems within marketing scholarship (that
includes Lusch as a co-author on an ambitious piece of marketing sys-
tems scholarship) as well as their own complicated legacy with respect to
their earlier commentary on the macro/micro focus. Establishing a sys-
tems perspective for S-D logic that uses a ‘new’ lexicon (though with
some recent precedent in IMP group work) and a bridging out to a ser-
vice systems/science research stream that lies outside of marketing, allows
them to present their perspective as fresh, yet based on historical streams
of research, without being subservient to them. And the idiosyncratic
(from a service science point of view) choices of ‘generic actor’ and ‘eco-
system’ serve to maintain a lexical and conceptual distance between S-D
logic and the IBM service systems group. That distance can be seen as a
way of maintaining control, but it can also be seen as a form of hedg-
ing—indicative of not wanting to commit entirely to this still developing
perspective. Indeed, one cannot but notice Vargo and Lusch’s (2011)
careful use of the word “potential” (p. 185) in the authors’ evaluation of
service science towards the end of their article.
Vargo and Lusch (2011) formally announces the new systems perspec-
tive for S-D logic and does some basic groundwork in terms of the lexi-
con that will be used and the research traditions that might be favoured
going forward. However, as noted, there is still a degree of hedging going
on even though the judgement of the marketing systems approaches of
230 C. Miles
Alderson and Layton appears to be quite final. As Vargo and Lusch con-
tinue to develop S-D logic, the systems orientation increases in centrality
but also remains somewhat amorphous. In Webster and Lusch (2013),
for example, we have an outline of a four-level marketing system that
bears far more similarity to the sort of systems approach outlined in
Layton (2008) (though still only Layton, 2007, is explicitly referenced)
than it does to the service system sketched out by Maglio and Spohrer
(2008). Indeed, there are no references to service systems or service sci-
ence across the entire paper and only one use of the phrase “service eco-
system” (in a citation back to Vargo & Lusch 2011). However, in Lusch
and Vargo (2014), the first and only non-edited collection on S-D writ-
ten by the two co-founders, we have not only a clear sense of how S-D
logic is a framework for “understanding human exchange and exchange
systems” (p. 101), but an entire chapter devoted to service ecosystems.
There also seems to be a decision regarding the way to deal with the issue
of historical legacy, as the authors restrict themselves to mentioning Plato
(non-marketing, obviously, but always a good source of ethos for those in
the Western scholarly tradition) and Bagozzi, who had been referred to in
passing in Vargo and Lusch (2011) but in Lusch and Vargo (2014) is
framed as the only named precedent for the ‘generic actor’ nomenclature
(though Gummesson and the IMP Group are mentioned in the end-
notes). Similarly, although Spohrer provides the book’s forward, the work
of the IBM service systems research group is only mentioned in a generic
way (vide p. 48), with citations out to work by Spohrer and Maglio at
occasional points, but no mentions in the main text. It is noticeable that
the book provides a clear defence of the choice of ‘ecosystems’ and this is
done in two stages. Firstly, Lusch and Vargo (2014) establish the idea of
a service network between actors, a concept that they describe as captur-
ing “much of the complexity of value cocreation but is still somewhat
static”, capable of informing “us about connections and ties but not
much about flows and exchanges between actors” (p. 160). Far more
“amenable” to the “dynamic service exchanges that are so central to S-D
logic” is the systems perspective. The systems perspective is immediately
linked to the concept of ‘ecosystem’, which has “begun to emerge in dis-
cussions of business, organizations, and economies”—one notes the ethos
generating use of social proof here, of course. However, the second ‘stage’
of the defence of ‘ecosystem’ then comes with the explanation that “the
concept comes from biology and zoology” (p. 160). For anyone that
remembers Sheth’s (2011) warning that a viable systems perspective for
marketing will have to look to the biological sciences for its context, this
comes as an interesting argument. Indeed, Sheth (2011) not only sug-
gested the biological context but also an evolutionary one, and that too is
supplied as Lusch and Vargo (2014) continue by describing how “coevo-
lution” is “central in natural ecosytems” (p. 161). This biological/evolu-
tionary framing is then further played out as the authors describe how
service ecosystems are relatively self-contained and self-adjusting.
Lusch and Vargo (2014) provide a stable depiction of a systems per-
spective for S-D logic based around a generic actor orientation to human
exchange systems with a focus on service ecosystems. The book does not
seek to strongly locate the systems approach in terms of a historical legacy
(even though there is a whole chapter devoted to the historical precedents
of the rest of the S-D logic). It focuses on establishing the conceptual and
lexical elements of a systems perspective that allow the logic to function
at different levels of abstraction across micro, meso and macro layers of
analysis, with a general orientation to a ‘living systems’ context.
The stable snapshot that Vargo and Lusch (2014) provides does not
imply that the systems implementation in S-D logic has reached a stage
of equilibrium. In Vargo and Lusch (2016), for example, the authors
finally re-engage with Layton, in the form of a comment on the relation-
ship between Layton’s (2011) marketing system paper and their formula-
tion of service ecosystems. Interestingly, the source of the differentiation
that they provide is based upon whether institutions are included or not
included in the marketing system (for Layton they are not, being part of
the environment, whereas for Vargo and Lusch they are). This is a differ-
ence concerning where to draw the system/environment boundary, and
as we have seen above, that drawing of the boundary should be under-
stood as arbitrary in a systems approach. Brand differentiation, then, is
more rhetorically important (i.e. becomes the core of the argumentation)
here than a reflexive systems approach. Vargo and Lusch (2016) also pro-
vides us with a further point of differentiation, this one concerning the
‘service systems’ conception, which the authors again remind us “is also
grounded in S-D logic” (p. 11). A service systems approach, they point
232 C. Miles
out, emphasises technology, whereas “the ‘service ecosystem’ definition in

S-D logic emphasizes the more general role of institutions” (ibid.), and
“technology is an institutional phenomenon”—so, the service ecosystem
approach contains (subsumes) the service system focus. We again here see
the urge to position S-D logic so it subsumes other approaches, envelops
them, provides a wider context and application. Yet, clearly this is not an
easy thing to do—it requires constant attention and explication. Historical
legacies that seem to have been elided come back and need to be re-
addressed, partnerships need to be re-positioned and their absorption
underlined.
The last aspect of the (very much ongoing) S-D logic systems discourse
that I want to examine is in the SAGE Handbook of Service-Dominant
Logic (edited by Vargo & Lusch, 2019). The Handbook was the “last
major project” that Vargo and Lusch worked on together before Lusch’s
death in 2017 (Vargo, 2019a, p. xxxvii) and pulls together a wide number
of contributors and covers a great deal of ground, with a total of 11 parts
(each with their own associate editors), the majority of which then con-
tain 4 chapters. Part IV of the Handbook is dedicated entirely to service
ecosystems and is provided with an introduction by Irene Ng, the associ-
ate editor for the part. What is striking about the introduction and the
four chapters that then follow it is the general willingness of the authors
to re-introduce the wider systems context into the discussion of S-D log-
ic’s service ecosystem framework. There is a strong sense across all five
pieces of work still very much in progress and this is helped by the fact
that neither Vargo nor Lusch are represented in the contributing authors
here (and this is true for most of the Handbook, indeed). A small collec-
tion of voices, with some different ideas and perspectives, but generally
working on trying to make the service ecosystem framework as useful as
possible. In particular, Godsiff et al. (2019) provide a chapter that con-
siders the evolution of systems thought in general and suggests what its
legacy and approach might mean for S-D logic. The language is quite
speculative and preliminary, suggesting that there might be mappings
from the various traditions of systems thought that could be applied
fruitfully to S-D logic’s service ecosystem explorations. It is, broadly, an
appeal to service ecosystems researchers to engage in more cross-
disciplinary and empirical work with the broader systems thinking
traditions. In addition, Ng et al.’s (2019) chapter on the service system

approach swings back against Vargo and Lusch’s (2016) subsumption of
service systems/science into S-D logic’s service ecosystem, reiterating that
the “top concept for Service Science is ‘ecology’ rather than ‘ecosystem’”,
explaining that “the principles of ecology are used to understand the
interactions between service system entities, and their interactions with
their environment and the evolving ecology of service system entities”
(p. 236). So, the lexical and conceptual differentiation between service
systems/science and the service ecosystem framework continues but the
Handbook does not frame it with competitive or alternative commentary
that might undercut it. Instead, Spohrer and Maglio, who are co-writing
with Ng and Wakenshaw here, are able to chart the development,
and explore the future, of service science as a supportive partner of the
S-D logic.
The Rhetorical Power of Systems in S-D Logic

The journey of S-D logic’s relationship with the systems perspective is a
fascinating one. From the importance of systems theory in the precursor
work of Lusch, to its absence in Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) foundational
presentation of S-D logic, to the defensive plays against the marketing
systems legacy in the early years after that, to the gradual signs of willing-
ness to allow a systems approach in to the logic, to the final formal decla-
ration of a systems perspective, the selection of service systems as a
possible lexical and conceptual partner, the development of the in-house
service ecosystems approach, the lexical and conceptual chaffing between
the two, and finally (well, probably not finally), what seems like the re-
engagement with wider historical traditions of systems thought and a
plurality of systems approaches.
The Agon of Lexical Control
So much of this journey is about conceptual and lexical control. Vargo

and Lusch have demonstrated over and over again their sensitivity to the
234 C. Miles
significance of lexicon. It is right there in the discussion section of Vargo

and Lusch (2004)—the recognition that in order to evolve to “an operant-
resource-based, service-centered dominant logic, academic marketing
may need to rethink and revise some of the lexicon” (p. 14). A revised
lexicon’s function is to “refocus perspective through reorientation rather
than reinvention” (ibid.). In certain aspects of Vargo and Lusch’s project
the lexicon revision has been comparatively quick and successful—the
use of the phrase ‘service-dominant logic’ itself and the adoption of ‘co-
creation of value’ as a central term are good examples. The engagement
with a systems perspective, however, has been more fraught with lexical
challenges—tensions between ‘ecosystem’ and ‘ecology’, ‘agents’ and
‘entities’, ‘systems theory’ and ‘systems perspective’, ‘marketing system’
and ‘service system’ have all found their way into the rhetorical weave of
S-D logic development and are evident of the agon of lexical control, the
inevitable contesting nature of lexical reorientation. Vargo and Lusch, as
rhetors, have sensibly sought to find exactly the right words and phrases
as the signifiers to build the evolving logic. That has inevitably meant a
degree of exploration, of feeling out what might work best and what
might need to be discarded in order to arrive at a lexicon that does not
hamper further development. Vargo (2008) has written of the “pitfalls”
or “paradigmatic traps” (p. 212) of using the lexicon of the G-D logic to
describe a logic that transcends it, such as S-D logic. Indeed, in Vargo
and Lusch (2008) they talk of correcting the “lexical slips” (p. 2) that
were made in early formulations of the FPs and also go on to note the
“managerial phrasing” that had crept into their early discussions of those
FPs. The systems perspective (and shift to a macro orientation) can be
seen as part of an effort to find the best lexicon to counter such traps and
pitfalls. And this makes sense both from the position of conceptual devel-
opment but also from the position of effective rhetorical presentation to
an audience. The reorientation that S-D logic promises is a reorientation
of the audience, remember—it is the audience that, hopefully, will begin
to see ‘service as the fundamental basis of exchange’ and that ‘goods are a
distribution mechanism of service exchange’. The object of all theory
generation, including that of Vargo and Lusch, is not to change the world
but to change the way that the audience understands the world. Words
are a fundamental tool in effecting such change. The struggle to build an
in-house lexicon for the S-D logic systems approach, one that will not
lead the logic into pitfalls further down its development, reflects the fact
that the choice to call it a ‘marketing system’ or a ‘service ecosystem’, or a
‘service ecology’ is an existential one. It also means that the attention of
the audience will hopefully not become fragmented (so that they do not
wander off in search of more information about this interesting ‘ecology’
idea, or pursue a bit of research on ‘entities’, or Fisk’s or Layton’s ‘market-
ing systems’). I think that this is exactly what Layton’s (2008) paper rep-
resents to S-D logic in the years 2008 to 2016 (the core years for the S-D
logic service ecosystem development)—the threat of fragmented audi-
ence attention and a diffused lexicon. As rhetors, Vargo and Lusch need
to shape their audience’s interpretation and understanding by controlling
the lexicon. Telling their audience that the marketing system approaches
of both Alderson and Layton are tainted by G-D logic thinking (and its
lexicon) is a powerful way of painting a big scarlet letter on them—‘their
ideas, while worthy in some ways, risk leading you into those dangerous
paradigmatic pitfalls … steer clear and stick to the terms we shall intro-
duce you to’.
The Agon of Kairos
Given that Vargo and Lusch have been evolving S-D logic in public view
over many years that has meant that some of the process of lexical and
conceptual consideration has been more public (in the sense of laid out in
journal articles and book chapters) than any rhetor might ideally wish it
to be. What I have called above the volte face around the macro systems
perspective that occurs in Vargo and Lusch (2008) is a good example of
the rhetorical bind that scholars can find themselves in when they realize
that they need to reverse a previously held position in order to move the
conceptual development of their work onward. The whole episode can be
seen as revolving around a figure of lexical reversal, the substance of which
I might summarise as a chiasmus: ‘where we once held that one best
understands the macro through a consideration of the micro, we now
realise that it is better to understand the micro through a consideration of
the macro’. While this particular reversal is not made explicit (as I have
236 C. Miles
noted above, Vargo and Lusch’s, 2008, invocation of irony seems like it
might be referencing it but could be interpreted differently), this is not to
say that the founders of S-D logic have not recognised the kairotic, time-
contingent, nature of their logic’s development. As noted above, Vargo
and Lusch have, at times, used hedging language in regards to their explo-
rations of lexical choice and conceptual ruminations and this helps to
make clear that some of these choices might change or further develop as
work is done by them and others. The fact is that S-D logic has under-
gone substantial revisions since its foundational presentation in 2004 and
those revisions have been publicly presented, explained, and defended by
Vargo and Lusch. This engagement with change and development, with
the effects of reflection and discussion is a significant rhetorical feature of
the development of S-D logic. Vargo and Lusch respond to the audience
(as the lexical revisions of Vargo & Lusch, 2008, demonstrate) but they
also respond to their own discussions with other scholars (as the engage-
ment with service science demonstrates, amongst many other instances).
Such kairotic awareness does not mean that they will not elide or mask
other reversals or competing/alternative versions or that they will always
accept and adapt to every instance of criticism. The rhetor makes con-
stant choices regarding what to respond to and what to ignore, what to
accept into an argument and what to treat as superfluous or threatening.
The journey of the systems perspective in S-D logic is a perfect example,
over a long discourse stream, of how a rhetor (or, here, a team of rhetors)
might deal with the kairotic challenges of changing environments (new
research streams surfacing, old research streams offering alternative ver-
sions, etc.), internal reflections and realisations (the presence of what
Nienkamp, 2001, calls the ‘internal rhetoric’ of self-persuasion), as well
as the shifting structural demands of a developing logic. Seeing Vargo and
Lusch as the ‘rhetors’ of S-D logic allows us to frame the reversals, shift-
ing alliances, lexical control strategies, and changes in direction as kairotic
responses to the changing environment, necessary adaptations in the
larger goal of moving the audience towards an adherence to the service-
dominant perspective.
The Agon of Ethos
Considering the central place that rhetorical presentation of the history

of marketing thought plays in the foundational 2004 paper (see Chap.
3), it is significant that the history of systems thought in marketing does
not play a strong part in Vargo and Lusch’s engagement with the system
perspective. I have made the case in Chap. 4 that Kiel et al. (1992) is a
precursor paper to Vargo and Lusch (2004) in terms of its ambition for a
general theory of marketing and the eventual turn to the systems perspec-
tive, but the foundational paper itself does not engage with systems per-
spectives at all. Instead, through the concepts of paradigm and evolving
logic a case is made for a particular historical movement of which the
service-dominant perspective can be seen as embodying the latest stage.
When they do begin the turn towards a systems perspective, one might
have expected Vargo and Lusch to return to the format of their original
historical argument. Much of the power of Vargo and Lusch (2004)
comes from the subtle way that it leverages the ethos of so much market-
ing history, demonstrating the way that major figures in previous market-
ing thought had been prefiguring various aspects of the emerging
dominant logic. This is part of their very effective ‘reorientation not revo-
lution’ strategy. By reinterpreting marketing thought as a gradual attempt
to throw off the shackles of goods-dominant logic they are able to persua-
sively present a case for S-D logic that does not involve the throwing
away of so much valuable disciplinary credibility. However, when it
comes to connecting the logic with a systems perspective this is a more
sensitive task. Firstly, the systems tradition in marketing is less familiar to
the majority of their scholarly audience—its ethos is thus weaker. Also,
with its focus on flow, dynamics, assortments, hierarchical nested levels,
and embedding of marketing within larger institutional and social sys-
tems, the legacy of marketing systems research has the potential to under-
mine the shape of the historical narrative that Vargo and Lusch had built
the foundational paper on. Its long-standing use in macromarketing
thought further complicates its integration into that historical narrative.
In addition, the rhetorical strategies that had worked well for the 2004
foundational paper are not strategies that could, or should, be
238 C. Miles
continually relied upon—for the introduction of a new logic to the audi-

ence of the Journal of Marketing, a vividly drawn picture of historical
inevitability might be attractive, but as that logic gains more familiarity
the sort of ethos building that a historical argument provides becomes
less impactful. Instead, far stronger ethos amplification will come from
new (though familiarly branded) and cutting-edge sources, such as that
provided by the IBM research on service science. The rhetorical lesson
here is that history is useful when it can be used to create a simple, power-
ful narrative that leads clearly in one direction. When it is too problem-
atic to handle in such a way, it is best left alone, or at least its discussion
and possible integration can be deferred until important components like
the core lexicon have been largely settled.
The Transcendence of Systems
The final point that I wish to engage with regarding the rhetorical signifi-
cance of the systems perspective in S-D logic is with regard to the issue of
transcendence that I initially touched upon in Chap. 4. In Vargo (2007)
transcendence is invoked as a way of resolving the, perhaps paradoxical,
demand from some scholars for a plurality of paradigms—namely, that
“S-D logic and G-D logic should coexist” (p. 106). The three possible
responses to the paradox of paradigmatic plurality are, as Vargo sees
them, acceptance, confrontation, and transcendence. While he notes that
many people see Vargo and Lusch advocating the second option, they
would be incorrect. It is the third strategy, of transcendence, “essentially
finding a level of abstraction and perspective at which the paradox is
resolved [that] is closer to what Bob Lusch and I have been advocating
with S-D logic” (ibid.). In Vargo’s view, S-D logic makes the paradox
“unnecessary” and “resolved”—because “service and goods coexist with a
common purpose (service)” (ibid.). From this stage, transcendence
becomes an important part of the promotional message of S-D logic.
Vargo (2009), for example, devotes an entire article to building out the
concept of a “transcending conceptualization of relationship”, heavily
connecting into the existing business ecosystem literature that will
become so important for the eventual formal turn to a systems
perspective in Vargo and Lusch (2011). In Vargo and Lusch (2014), we

see the depiction of “S-D logic as transcending” the goods-dominant
logic, which is “nested in S-D logic” (p. 9). In Vargo and Lusch (2017),
the move away from “myopically pre-assigning roles, such as producer’
and ‘consumer’” and towards the “adoption of ‘generic actors’”, as in
Vargo and Lusch (2011), is described as a “transcending conceptualiza-
tion” (p. 54). By the time we get to Vargo’s (2019b) brief three page
introduction to the SAGEe Handbook of Service-Dominant Logic, the con-
cept of transcendence is mentioned three times, and has become central
to the manner in which he describes S-D logic—it’s nature is “transcend-
ing” (p. 1), it provides “an alternative orientation that transcends the
goods-services divide” (p. 3), and, again, S-D logic has “a broad appeal
and transcending nature” (p. 6).
Transcendence as a concept is one that we already know from Chap. 4
is to be found in certain formulations of systems theory. Indeed, in Polese
et al. (2020), a conference paper with Vargo as one of the co-authors, we
can be certain that Vargo is aware of the connection, as we read that “the
hierarchy of complexity of organizations by Boulding ranges from struc-
tures exhibiting static behavior (such as crystal structures) to transcen-
dental systems (such as the idea of God)” (p. 1637).
However, I would argue that transcendence is far more than just the
highest level of complexity in a particular approach to systems thinking.
More fundamentally, it summarises the value of the universal metonymy
that the idea of a ‘system’ offers. Systems thinking promises an elevating
of perception and understanding. Rather than just focusing on the micro
level (or indeed just focusing on the macro level), a systems approach
transcends both levels by positing an overarching dynamic of complexity
and emergence in which such levels are subsumed. Transcendence is the
motivation for all grand theory—to finally be able to see how everything
is connected, to choose at will one’s level of analytical lens, always know-
ing that one can transcend beneath and above. Transcendence, further-
more, means that issues of tension, paradox, and incompatibility can be
escaped by identifying the next level up, the level that subsumes all con-
tradiction. It is a unifying force.
In Chap. 4 I introduced the idea of the evolving value proposition of
S-D logic, suggesting that the ability to zoom in and out of systems forms
240 C. Miles
the core of that proposition. When we consider the universal metonymy

of the systems concept and the growing role that the promise of transcen-
dence has in mid- to late-period S-D logic, we can also see that the evolv-
ing value proposition is very similar to the original value proposition of
the 2004 foundational paper. It is the revelation of a unifying force for
marketing thought. Whereas Vargo and Lusch (2004) argued that what
had been previously understood as fragmentation was, in fact, an emerg-
ing unity, the evolving form of S-D logic moves away from a vision of
unity based on the interpretation of existing scholarship and moves
towards the presentation of the system (in the final form of the service
ecosystem) as a transcending perspective that reveals the innate unity in
what we as marketers (no matter our stripe) concern ourselves with. This
vision of a unifying transcendence is the source of the rhetorical force
across the long development of S-D logic and it is, in the end, the heart
of its consistent value proposition.
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Index1
A Alderson, W., 188, 190,

Abstraction/abstracted, 203, 210, 212–214, 223, 225,
211, 224–226, 231, 238 226, 230, 235
Accumulation, 186, 204 Allegory, 33
Achrol, R., 93 Alliteration/alliterative,
Ackoff, R., 202 55–57, 89, 219
Actor(s)/actor-to-actor (A2A), 4–7, AMA, 194, 212, 213
9, 10, 15, 50, 109, 149–155, Analogy/analogical, 51,
175, 184, 223–225, 228, 100, 101
230, 231 Anaphora, 55, 89
Adherence, 3, 7, 79, 236 Antagonistic, 23, 120, 144, 170
Advertising, 4–6, 8, 33, 34, 44, 45, Antimetabole, 56
53, 70, 71, 99, 109, 116, 137, Antithesis, 55, 56, 189
182, 187, 206, 207, 209, 214 Appeal (rhetorical), 120
Agon/agonistic/agonism, 4, 12, 16, Appropriateness, 58
40, 69–120, See also Decorum/
233–235, 237–238 decorous; Prepon
See also Struggle Arete, 118
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46510-9
248 Index
Argumentation, 4, 15–17, 25, 28, Bateson, G., 85–87, 200

29, 38–40, 42, 47, 48, 51, 54, Beer, S., 36, 202
57, 58, 72–74, 76, 84, 85, 93, Bellman, S., 172
94, 109–120, 135, 136, 142, Beneficiary/beneficiaries, 4, 6, 7, 9,
157, 171, 222, 226, 229, 231 10, 15, 152
Argumentum ad absurdum, 218 Benefit, 5–7, 17, 41, 47, 96, 118,
Argumentum ad 149, 150, 188
antiquitatem, 48, 190 See also Unique Selling
Argumentum ad nauseam, 119 Proposition (USP); Value
Argumentum ad numerum, 186 Proposition
Argumentum ad populum, 193 Benevolent dictator, 161, 163
Argumentum ad verecundiam, 218 Beniger, J., 206
Aristotle/Aristotelian, 3, 23, 26, 38, Berkenkotter, C., 40, 74
43–45, 47, 49–51, 58, 70, Bettis, R., 99–104, 106, 130, 199
105, 109, 133 Bitzer, L., 58, 59
Artifice, 24, 159 Blair, J., 47
Ashby, R., 36, 200, 202, 205, Bolton, R., 71, 72, 74, 75, 78, 103,
209, 212 116, 118
Assonance, 55 Boulding, K., 129, 137, 201, 239
Asyndeton, 56 Boundary, 220, 231
Attention economy, 35–37 Bradshaw, A., 88, 186
Augustine, 26 Brand/branding, 6–9, 13, 44, 48, 52,
Authority/authoritative, 16, 24, 92, 103, 108, 169, 172–175, 179,
109, 111–114, 118, 174, 180, 180, 187, 191, 195, 196,
181, 218 207, 221
See also Ethos Bredin, H., 210
Auxtova, K., 28 Brezis, E., 72
Axioms/axiomatic/axiomisation, 15, Brock, B., 30
17, 104, 108, 127, 128, 134, Brown, S., 3, 33, 51–53, 56, 72, 88,
140, 147–153, 155–160, 162, 108, 112, 113
170, 175, 180, 182, 183, 185 Browser, 170, 172, 173, 178,
See also Foundational premises 187, 187n1
(FPs/FP1-10) Brozovic, D., 7, 15
Brugger, N., 170
Buckley, W., 205
B Burke, K., 7, 23, 31, 85–87, 106
Bartels, R., 108 Burrell, G., 94, 95, 97
Bastiat, F., 188, 190 Buzzell, R., 108
Index 249
C Connotation/connote, 9, 25, 50, 79,

Cahn, M., 117 89, 90, 93, 94, 97, 101, 104,
Campaign, 6, 7, 9, 45, 97, 119, 180, 105, 138, 143, 144, 160,
207, 208, 214 162–164, 174, 176–178, 181,
Canonical/canon, 11, 158, 162, 178, 183, 184, 187–189, 196,
182, 185, 190 208–211, 228
Capelli, S., 51 Consigny, S., 10, 150
Carman, J., 212 Consumer/consumers/consumption,
Cassin, B., 43 42, 53, 71, 108, 111, 112,
Charteris-Black, J., 47, 53 114–116, 137, 172, 194, 206,
Chiasmus, 235 207, 209, 215, 216, 225, 239
Chowdhury, S., 41 Contagion, 107
Churchman, C., 202 Control, 108, 180, 183, 194, 200,
Cialdini, R., 48, 109, 190 202, 203, 206–209, 225, 226,
Cicero, 24, 26, 43, 58, 220 229, 233–236
Citation/cite, 1, 2, 14, 15, 49, 71, See also Feedback
72, 78, 86, 95, 96, 98, 99, Conversation, 54, 72, 76
101, 102, 110–114, 116, 128, Coraiola, D., 78–80
157, 158, 185, 218, 220, Cornelissen, J., 51, 86, 87
228, 230 Credible/credibility, 17, 29, 38, 39,
Clairvoyant/clairvoyance, 113 46, 51, 52, 90, 105, 118, 139,
Close reading, 14, 16, 18, 31, 32, 171, 172, 176, 237
34, 35, 37 See also Ethos
Cluley, R., 25 Critique, 73, 119, 129, 157, 158, 228
Cocreation, 152, 154, 163, 175, 230 Culler, J., 31
Colour, 175, 183, 186–188 Cybernetics, 18, 36, 131,
Commentaries/commentary, 8, 16, 137, 199–240
74, 75, 77, 78, 95, 97, 103, Cybersyn, 202
115–119, 146, 151, 184,
229, 233
Community, 6, 11, 17, 53, 76, 88, D
92, 153, 158, 161–163, 173, Davis, P., 25
192–194, 197, 213, 217 Decorum/decorous, 26, 58, 88,
Complex/complexity, 18, 25, 34, 39, 117, 192
40, 42–44, 69, 77, 84, 100, Definition/definitional (as rhetorical
130–133, 139, 164, 174–176, strategy), 223
201, 207, 220, 225, 230, 239 Definitions (of rhetoric), 28, 119
Conley, T., 26, 43 Deighton, J., 74
250 Index
Deliberative (rhetoric), 45 Emery, F., 202

de Romilly, J., 43 Emotional, 25, 45–47, 70, 88, 194
Diagram (rhetorical use of ), See also Pathos
60, 177–178 Empedocles/Empedoclean, 134, 135
Dialogue/dialog, 8, 86, 153, 223 Energy (rhetorical), 17, 80
Dickinson, G., 7, 23, 28, Engagement, 9, 48, 57, 95, 139,
29, 70, 119 145, 146, 160, 182, 200, 216,
Dixon, D., 98, 99, 131, 212 220, 222–224, 229, 234,
Donawerth, J., 41, 42 236, 237
Douglas, S., 138 Engineering, 200, 207–211
Dowling, G., 131 Enthymeme, 47, 225
Drama/dramatise/ Environment (system
dramatisation, 91, 183 environment), 231
Duffy, P., 200 See also Boundary
Duncan, T., 8 Epideictic, 26, 44, 45, 91–92,
147, 191–193
Epistrophe, 55, 89
E Equilibrium, 100, 101, 103, 134,
Ecology, 130, 228, 233–235 201, 203, 220, 231
Economics/economy/economist, 25, Era (of marketing history), 84
35–37, 48, 51, 80–83, 92, Erase/erasure, 46, 145
108, 110, 112, 128, 129, 132, Eschatological/eschatology, 113, 131
134–136, 149, 153, 154, 189, Eskin, C., 91, 117
190, 201, 205, 215, 216, 227, Ethos, 16, 29, 45, 46, 48, 49, 75, 76,
228, 230 80, 94, 101, 105, 107, 109,
Ecosystem, 217, 228–231, 233, 142, 146, 153, 156, 159,
234, 238 163, 171, 174, 178, 179,
See also Service ecosystem/ 181, 183, 188, 190–194, 196,
service system 201, 221, 223, 224,
Editor, 11–13, 30, 40, 71–75, 97, 230, 237–238
103, 116, 118, 119, 151, 169, Eulogy, 191–194
172, 214, 232 Evidence, 2, 24, 25, 57, 79, 85, 89,
Elision/elided, 82, 151, 225, 232 91, 111, 113, 118, 119, 152,
Emergence/emergent/emerge, 3, 10, 180, 185, 188, 194
82, 83, 85, 90, 92, 98, 100, Evolution/evolutionary/evolving, 1,
117, 119, 130–132, 145, 151, 6, 10, 14–18, 36, 40, 69, 72,
157, 159, 160, 203, 204, 209, 77, 79, 81–84, 87, 99–102,
210, 213, 215, 217–219, 109, 111–115, 120, 127–164,
230, 239 176, 177, 180, 182–185, 187,
Index 251
188, 191, 193, 197, 201, 205, Fligstein, N., 206

216, 220, 223, 227, 231–235, Flow, 129, 175, 204, 206, 214, 215,
237, 239, 240 230, 237
Ewen, S., 207 Foerster, H. von, 200
Exchange (value), 5 Forensic (rhetoric), 45
Experience, 6, 7, 10, 39, 48, 54, 72, Forrester, J., 201, 227
138, 147, 176, 186, 195, 215 Foss, S., 8, 29, 30, 32, 33, 43, 60
Experiment/experimental/ Foster, W., 78
experimentalist, 35, 38, Fougère, M., 28
107, 208 Foundational paper (Vargo & Lusch,
Exploratory (research), 28 2004), 1, 2, 12, 15–17, 49, 54,
Extension (of logic), 216 59, 70, 71, 97, 98, 109, 132,
Eyman, D., 196 151, 157–159, 237, 240
Foundational premises (FPs/FP1-10),
2, 4, 5, 15, 17, 73, 77, 103,
F 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 119,
Fagan, R., 204, 205 127, 128, 137, 139–153,
Fahnestock, J., 43, 49–51, 53, 155–160, 162, 163, 170, 175,
55–57, 91, 105, 106 182–185, 222, 233, 234, 236
Fallacy/fallacies, 48, 49, 174 Fragmentation (of marketing
See also Argumentum ad thought), 3, 83, 84, 91, 99,
Farnsworth, W., 55, 89 113, 131
Farrell, T., 23 Framework, 2, 15, 28, 29, 31, 44,
Feedback, 72, 156, 200, 203, 204, 69, 76, 77, 82, 88, 89, 94, 98,
206, 207, 209 103, 116, 129, 131–134, 136,
See also Control; Loop 138, 144–146, 151, 153–157,
Fern, 176 159, 161, 169, 182, 201,
See also Koru; Spiral/spirality/ 207, 220–222, 224–230,
spiralling 232, 233
Fernandez, K., 108 Framing/frame/framed, 3, 13, 16,
Feudalism/feudal, 163 29, 30, 32, 34, 47, 48, 76–80,
Figure (rhetorical use of )/figural/ 83–88, 90, 92, 93, 96,
figuration, 38, 89, 107, 115 100–102, 113, 115–119, 128,
Fillis, I., 51 130, 132, 135, 139, 150, 152,
Fiore, J. de, 113 160, 185, 188, 191, 199, 208,
Fisk, G., 129, 131, 212, 214, 220, 230, 231, 233, 236
223, 235 See also Stasis
Fleckenstein, K., 85 Frow, P., 7
252 Index
G Heap/heaping, 93, 186

Gardner, D., 88 See also Accumulation
Garrett, D., 88 Hedging (language)/hedge, 149, 236
General systems theory (GST), Helle, P., 179
128–131, 137–139, 199, 201, Hermeneutics, 38
212, 223 Hermetic, 38, 211
See also Systems theory Herrick, J., 23
Genre, 44–45, 73, 91, 118, 191 Hersh, R., 25
Godsiff, P., 232 Hess, A., 192
Goffman, E., 86, 87 Hierarchy/hierarchies/hierarchical,
Goldhaber, M., 35 54, 84, 132, 133, 152, 159,
Goods-dominant logic (G-D logic), 175, 204, 217, 218,
114, 132, 143–145, 225, 234, 237, 239
235, 237–239 See also Levels
Google, 78 Hirschman, E., 33, 51
Google Scholar, 1, 78, 128 History (as rhetoric), 13, 26, 34,
Goolsby, J., 80 43–45, 59, 78–92, 119, 184,
Gorgias, 58 188–191, 237, 238
Greco-Roman rhetoric, 41, 48 Holistic/holism, 6, 10, 129,
Greenwood, M., 60, 90 154, 217
Gries, L., 60 Hollander, S., 81, 129, 135
Griffin, C., 8 Homepage, 170, 172
Grossbart, S., 215 Horton, R., 38, 39
Gruen, T., 181, 182 Hughes, T., 108
Guler, E., 41 Humanities, 3, 16, 27, 29, 30,
Gummesson, E., 74, 161, 169, 188, 33–37, 39, 193
224, 230 Hunt, S., 72, 74, 80, 81, 94–98,
Gunn, J., 148 108, 137, 169, 214, 221
H I
Hackley, C., 3 IBM, 223, 225, 226, 228–230, 238
Hall, A., 204, 205 Idiom/idiomatic, 45, 87, 98,
Hammond, D., 129 138, 139
Haslam, S., 86 Improvisation/improvisatory, 9, 117
Hawhee, D., 75–77 Inevitability, 16, 89, 94, 101,
Haygood, D., 5 128, 238
Hayles, N. K., 36, 37 Interactivity/interactive, 11, 170,
Haylock, B., 60, 90 171, 196
Index 253
Interpretation, 7, 31, 49, 58, 75, 84, Kinneavy, J., 91, 117
86, 88, 92, 117, 118, 130, Kjeldsen, J., 70
132, 134, 157, 171, 175–177, Koru, 17, 133, 175–178, 187
213, 235, 240 See also Spiral/spirality/spiralling
Invitational rhetoric, 8 Koskull, C., 28
Irony, 25, 105, 224, 236 Kotler, P./Kotlerism, 93, 98, 112,
Islamic rhetoric, 41 138, 169, 188, 190, 207, 208
Isocrates/Isocratean, 43 Kuhn, T./Kuhnian, 93–99, 101–103,
Israelsen, T., 78, 79 128, 133
See also Paradigm/paradigmatic
J
Jack, G., 78, 79 L
Jackson, D., 87, 205 Laczniak, G., 214, 216
Johnson, M., 51, 54, 106, 211 Ladik, D., 12
Jolibert, A., 51 Laffan, L, 161
Jones, D., 80 Lakoff, G., 51, 54, 106, 211
Journal of Marketing (JoM), 1, 11, Lanham, R., 37, 43, 50, 51, 54, 56,
46, 60, 69, 71, 75, 77, 79, 106, 186
115, 116, 133, 136, 137, 169, Lanning, M., 5
188, 199, 238 Lastovicka, J., 108
Journey, 11, 13, 72, 102, 157, Laufer, R., 3
233, 236 Layton, R., 131, 213–216, 218–223,
See also Narrative (as rhetorical 225, 226, 228, 230, 231, 235
strategy) Lazarsfeld, P., 200, 207
Juxtapose/juxtaposition, 188, 221 Lee, A., 194
Legacy, 4, 30, 38, 40–43, 56, 104,
108, 160, 192, 193, 212, 218,
K 223, 225–227, 229–233, 237
Kairos/kairotic, 9, 26, 58–59, 88, Lens, 3, 16, 42, 82, 153, 154, 239
91–92, 117–120, 127, 146, 152, See also Telescope/telescoping
160, 171, 185, 196, 235–236 Levels, 29, 36, 50, 108, 132,
Kalantzis, M., 202 137–139, 154, 159, 177–179,
Kant, E., 24 186, 202, 216–220, 224,
Kennedy, G., 41, 43, 44, 47, 51 231, 237–239
Kern, R., 192 See also Hierarchy/hierarchies/
Kiel, L., 17, 18, 82, 104, 105, hierarchical
127–137, 199, 201, 217, Levitt, T., 32, 114, 137, 138
220, 237 Levy, S., 138
254 Index
Lexicon/lexical, 2, 4, 11, 16, 17, 28, Mathematical/mathematico-, 25, 86,

29, 31, 45, 50, 51, 93–99, 96, 98, 104–106, 108, 109,
101–103, 106–108, 111, 119, 200, 208
130, 131, 138, 139, 142–148, McCloskey, D., 25, 52, 53, 107
150–152, 154, 157, 158, 160, McCroskey, J., 43, 44
201, 203, 204, 224, 225, 228, McQuarrie, E., 34, 35
229, 231, 233–236, 238 Mead, M., 176, 200
Linux, 161–163 Meadows. D., 201, 203–205
Literary, 30, 31, 33, 34, 158 Megill, A., 25
Lloyd, K., 41 Melfi, A., 41
Locke, J., 24 Memoriam/memorialisation,
Logemann, M., 87 173, 191–194
Logos, 45, 47–49, 109–118, 175 Menu, 172–174, 185–188, 194, 195
Longaker, M., 32, 33, 84 Merton, R., 207
Loop, 200, 203, 204, 206, 207, 210 Meta-, 87, 96, 137, 187
See also Control; Feedback Metaphor/metaphorical, 3, 7, 25, 32,
Luhmann, N., 210 38, 46, 51–54, 60, 69, 70, 73,
86, 87, 99–101, 105, 108,
113, 114, 133, 137–139, 142,
M 153, 154, 159, 160, 162–164,
Macro, 154, 178, 214, 216–220, 170, 188, 189, 203, 209, 210
224, 229, 231, 234, 235, 239 Methodology/methodological, 24,
Macromarketing/macromarketer, 26–41, 134, 201, 209
131, 213–215, 217, 218, Metonymy/metonymic/metonym,
224, 237 52–54, 104–109, 119, 210,
Macy conferences, 200–202, 212 211, 239, 240
Madhavaram, S., 221 Meyers, P., 129, 212
Magic/magical, 43, 104–109 Michaels, E., 5
Maglio, P., 222, 223, 226, 228, Mick, D., 34, 35
230, 233 Microeconomics, 82, 92
Malthus, 110, 135 Middleton, P., 31
Manipulation/manipulative, 8, 9, 24, Miller, C., 150
38, 40, 46, 54, 106, 182, Mindset, 77, 144, 159, 181, 182,
206, 207 185–190, 192, 196, 197
Maori, 175, 176 Moeller, H-G., 210
See also Koru Moore, E., 80, 217
Marsh, C., 43, 84 Morgan, G., 94, 95, 97
Martin, J., 24, 54, 55 Morgan, R., 95
Index 255
Moriarty, S., 8 O’Shaughnessy, N., 60, 140,

Munz, P., 24 158, 159
Myopia/myopic, 113, 114, Ottman, J., 138
137–139, 154
P
N Packard, V., 206
Narayandas, D., 74 Paradeise, C., 3
Narrative (as rhetorical strategy), 3, Paradigm/paradigmatic, 11–13, 29,
7, 9, 14, 17, 18, 69, 78–80, 33, 42, 59, 76, 77, 82, 84, 85,
136, 184, 197, 237, 238 90–99, 101–103, 110, 114,
See also Value proposition 115, 127–130, 132, 133, 138,
Navigation (website), 143, 145, 159, 160, 185, 212,
172–174, 186–188 213, 218, 235, 237, 238
Nelson, J., 25 See also Kuhn, T./Kuhnian
Nemeroff, C., 107 Paradox/paradoxical, 86, 90, 137,
Network, 35, 114, 129, 152, 161, 154, 238, 239
215, 225, 230 Parallel/parallelism, 47, 52,
Ng, E., 233 56, 57, 128
Nienkamp, J., 236 Parfitt, E., 73
Nilsson, T., 3 Parvatiyar, A., 93
Non-western rhetorics, 16, 41–43 Pask, G., 203, 205, 209
Pathos, 45–50, 142, 163, 171,
189, 191–196
O Patterning/pattern (rhetorical use
Observer, 131, 205, 209 of ), 47, 48, 55, 70, 217
Occult, 37, 38, 148, 211 Pecotich, A., 221
Offer, 5–7, 9, 10, 15, 50, 56, 74, 84, Peer review/peer reviewers, 40, 41,
91, 92, 114, 116, 117, 120, 46, 71–75, 102, 131, 162
180, 192, 197, 211, 215, 239 Perelman, Ch., 3, 7, 133
See also Value proposition Periodization/periodize, 129
Olbrechts-Tyteca, L., 133 Persuasion/persuaders/persuade, 7–9,
Ong, W., 76 23–27, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 58,
Open source, 17, 119, 156, 160–164 70, 79, 86, 87, 113, 118, 182,
Operand, 3, 89, 110, 149 186, 207, 219, 229
Operant, 3, 89, 110, 117, 146, Phillips, B., 34
149, 150 Plato/platonists, 24, 37, 230
O’Shaughnessy, J., 140, 158, 159 Ploce/ploke, 89–91
256 Index
Pluralism/pluralising, 82 Q
Polese, F., 239 Qualitative, 28–30, 33, 83
Polysyndeton, 56, 89 Quantitative, 28, 29, 80, 83
Positioning, 13, 46, 52, 177, 206, Quintilian, 26, 43, 58
222, 224, 226, 228
Potter, J., 7, 23, 69, 120, 144, 169
PowerPoint, 179, 181 R
Pracejus, J., 187 Reeves, R., 5
Prahalad, C., 74, 99–104, 106, 130, Reflexive/reflexivity, 25, 27, 40, 153,
169, 199 184, 185, 231
Precursor, 15, 82, 104, 105, 113, Reframing, 87–89, 92, 151
127–139, 199, 217, See also Framing/frame/
233, 237 framed; Stasis
Premises, 12, 15, 47, 48, 70, 73, 77, Reiter, B., 27–30, 37, 39
86, 102, 104, 105, 108, 109, Rejoinder, 158
113, 139–160, 175 Rentschler, R., 52
See also Foundational premises Repetition (rhetorical use of ), 89–91
(FPs/FP1-10) Resonance/resonant, 2, 6, 7, 9, 12,
Prepon, 58 25, 75, 79, 87, 133, 138,
See also Decorum/decorous 147, 150
Prigogine, I., 132, 133 Resource, 3, 4, 27, 36, 39, 52, 78,
Promotion/promote/promotional, 7, 82, 88, 89, 99, 110, 117, 146,
8, 10, 17, 33, 44, 55, 57, 76, 149, 150, 155, 172, 173, 175,
80, 87, 111, 116, 137, 145, 178, 179, 194, 206, 211, 223
156–158, 163, 169, 176, 177, Revision/revisions, 4, 11, 14–17, 71,
182, 188, 194, 207, 208, 221, 72, 74, 101, 119, 132,
223, 238 141–156, 183, 234, 236
Proof (rhetorical types of ), 26, 38, Revolution/revolutionary, 93, 101,
45, 48, 191, 196 132, 143, 145, 205, 206, 237
See also Ethos; Logos; Pathos Rhetorica Ad Herennium, 26
Proposition, 4–7, 9, 11, 28, Rhetorical analysis, 11, 14–16,
114–116, 128, 131, 174, 221, 23–60, 73, 74, 85, 117,
225, 240 139–160, 169–197
See also Unique Selling Rhetorical criticism, 29–33, 37, 43
Proposition (USP); Value Rhetorical history, 78–92,
Proposition 119, 188–191
Prosopopoeia, 144 Rhetorical situation, 10, 58, 73
Protagoras, 77 Rhetorical tools, 163
Index 257
Rhetoric definitions, 24, 43, 59, Service ecosystem/service system,

60, 72, 150 156, 178, 222, 223, 225, 226,
Richardson, G., 200, 202, 205 228–235, 240
Ritson, M., 108 Shand, P., 175, 176
Rogatio, 83 Shaw, A., 81
Rossiter, J., 172 Shaw, E., 80
Royal Society, 24, 37, 38, 56 Shelby, H., 72, 74, 94, 133, 169, 221
Rozin, P., 107, 108 Sheth, J., 80, 88, 93, 212, 213, 216,
Rugina, A., 134–137 227–229, 231
Rust, R., 74, 98 Shostack, G., 98, 99
Shugan, S., 74
Shultz, C., 215
S Silos/siloisation, 29, 200
Salvatory/salvation, 16, 113, 116, Simon, H., 35, 36
118, 119 Sirgy, J., 131
Scheme/schema, 50, 54–58, 99, 131, Site, 9, 16, 17, 40, 170–175,
136, 137, 172, 174 177–179, 185, 187, 187n1,
See also Trope 192, 195–197, 229
Schiappa, E., 24 See also Website
Schismogenesis, 200 Situational incoherence, 150, 151
Schmidz, D., 193, 194 Skålén, P., 7
Schneider, N., 161–163 Sloan, A., 206
Schroeder, J., 33 Smith, A., 80
Schumacher, B., 131–133, 201 Smith, B., 31
Science, 11, 14, 16, 25–41, 51, 56, Smith, C., 26
57, 80, 83, 86, 93–97, 101, Sophist/sophistic, 43, 58
102, 104, 105, 108, 128–130, Spiral/spirality/spiralling, 17, 35,
134–137, 160, 200, 202, 205, 133, 175–178
210, 222, 226–231, 233, See also Koru
236, 238 Spohrer, J., 222, 223, 226,
Scientism, 16, 34, 107, 119, 137 228–230, 233
Scope, 2, 9, 14–16, 83, 127, 128, Stability/stable, 134, 148, 150, 151,
136, 137, 146, 188, 194, 201, 231
206, 214 Stakeholders, 4, 10, 27, 44, 60, 78,
Scott, L., 33 79, 116, 117, 190, 225
Scott, R., 30 Stark, R., 24, 37, 38
Scully, J., 51, 209 Stasis, 16, 84–88, 197
Senge, P., 201, 203 See also Framing/frame/framed
258 Index
Status, 1–14, 80, 84, 94, 108, 152, Synonym, 2, 50, 96

155–160, 183, 185 System-Embedded Service-
See also Ethos Dominant logic (SESD), 218,
Stengers, I., 132 220, 221
Stern, B., 33, 71, 75, 116 Systems theory, 17, 88, 100, 101,
Stewart, D., 12 130–132, 137, 199–240
Story, 7, 9–13, 34, 47, 48, 77, 81 See also Cybernetics; General
See also Narrative (as rhetorical Systems Theory (GST)
strategy)
Strang, W., 214
Strife, 119, 134 T
See also Agon/agonistic/agonism; Table (rhetorical use of ), 184
Struggle Tadajewski, M., 11–13, 33, 37, 82,
Struggle, 4, 12, 13, 16, 40, 75–77, 94, 95, 108
118, 120, 144, 145, 190, 234 Tannen, D., 76, 77
See also Agon/agonistic/ Tanniru, M., 224
agonism; Strife Tapp, A., 108
Style (rhetorical style), 34, 40, 42, Telescope/telescoping, 154
49, 50, 70, 105 Terminology, 13, 75, 94, 101,
See also Stylistics 107, 108, 131, 136, 211,
Stylistics, 33, 40, 46, 47, 49, 50, 57, 212, 224
58, 171, 194 See also Lexicon/lexical
See also Style (rhetorical style) Tindale, C., 109
Subbotsky, E., 79, 107 Tonks, D, 3
Substitution, 53, 54, 98, 105–107, Torvalds, L., 161–163
146, 151, 152, 210, 211 Transaction, 8, 219
Subsume/subsumption, 77, 115, Transcendence/transcending/
221, 226, 232, 233, 239 transcend, 7, 10, 17, 18, 88,
Suddaby, R., 78, 79 127–139, 149, 153, 154, 159,
Sullivan, D., 40, 91, 92 160, 197, 234, 238–240
Syllogism, 47, 109 Tregua, M., 2, 15
Symbolic/symbol, 17, 23, 24, 28, 30, Trope, 38, 50–52, 54, 57, 58, 105,
42, 53, 60, 133, 175–178 106, 113, 114, 139, 143, 151,
Synecdoche/synecdochal, 52–54, 181, 210
105–107, 210, 211 Tuominen, P., 51
See also Metonymy/ Typeface, 179, 186
metonymic/metonym See also Font
Index 259
U Vocabulary, 77, 106, 170

Umpleby, S., 200–202, 213 See also Lexicon/lexical
Uncertainty, 10, 91, 150, 194, 195 Von Bertalanffy, L., 201, 212
Unifying, 13, 80, 87, 113, 116, 149,
197, 201, 239, 240
Unique Selling Proposition (USP), 4, 5 W
See also Value proposition Wakenshaw, S., 233
Unity, 16, 83, 87, 88, 91, 110, 116, Walker, J., 32, 33, 84
118, 119, 187n1, 240 Watzlawick, P., 87, 88, 205
Untersteiner, M., 91 Weaver, S., 28
Utility, 115, 116 Website, 2, 17, 29, 44, 133,
169–175, 177, 178, 182, 185,
187, 189, 192–197
V Webster, F., 92, 154, 230
Value proposition, 3–7, 9, 10, Weebly.com, 172
13–17, 112, 114–119, 131, Werner, M., 86, 87
138, 145, 154, 160, 239, 240 Western rhetorical tradition, 8,
See also Unique Selling 16, 43, 117
Proposition (USP) See also Greco-Roman rhetoric
Vamos, M., 108 Wicheln, H., 30, 31
Variety amplification, 36 Wiener, N., 200, 202, 206
Vatz, R., 58, 59 Wijland, R., 33, 51, 53
Vedic, 41 Wilkie, W., 80, 217
Verene, D., 179 Wilkinson, I., 212
Vergani, T., 177 Williams, J., 112, 115, 162
Versions, 23, 41, 47, 72, 79, 91, 94, Worldview, 96, 110, 138, 219
120, 135, 144, 146, 162, See also Paradigm/paradigmatic
170–173, 175, 182, 185, 195, Wu, T., 35
225, 236
Villarino, J., 138
Visual rhetoric, 17, 59–60, 70, 90, Y
99, 104, 171, 174–188, 219 YouTube, 179, 180

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1 S-D Logic as Persuasive Discourse 1

2 Rhetorical Analysis and Marketing Texts 23

3 Rhetoric and the Agonistic Moment of S-D Logic 69

4 The Rhetorical Evolution of S-D Logic127

5 A Rhetorical Analysis of sdlogic.net169

6 The Rhetoric of Emerging Systems199

Table 4.1 Original FPs (Vargo & Lusch, 2004) 140

S-D Logic: Its Status as Marketing

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1

explicitly drawing a comparison between marketing and rhetoric. What

Marketing provides intermediary services to facilitate the continuing

Marketing is a process that directs, or seeks to manage the exchange of

uniquely and phenomenologically determined by the beneficiary” (Lusch

Advertising Standards Authority, the United Kingdom’s body for the

products, of goods, of stuff, are going to be resistant to the prospect of an

conclusion to their chapter, as they reproduce the voices of reviewers who

So, Vargo himself, as well as the combined voices of the reviewers of

A Few Words About Scope

service-dominant perspective. So, for the majority of the time I will be

The Structure of the Study

Foundational Premises, seeking to interrogate the nature of revision as a

Ladik, D. M., & Stewart, D. W. (2019). The Contribution Continuum

Nilsson, T. (2019). How Marketers Argue for Business – Exploring the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 23

characterizations for the sort of mental change sought by the practice of

The Rhetor and the Rhetorical Analyst

and continues on through the close relationship between forensics and

 hetorical Analysis as a Methodology

development project’, amongst many others. However, at the same time,

a qualitative research method that is designed for the systematic investiga-

There is an attempt here to both position rhetorical criticism within a

lexicon of ‘criticism’ and ‘close reading’. As Middleton has pointed out,

(2006) has rigorously explored the political and institutional pressures

discovery procedure” (ibid.)—but such valuable work is lacking if it is

by becoming surrogates for our own attention. We are outsourcing our

and indicative of reality”, whereas for the new experimentalists of the

carefully carved by the authors, through a complex undergrowth of com-

(scientific or otherwise) seeks to “cajole and convince”, it is vital for our

and different topic areas. To be sure, we all do this when submitting to

Non-Western Rhetorical Analysis

history, there is also much that is immediately relevant to consideration

tradition of rhetoric there are competing and alternative voices. For

Key Rhetorical Concepts

The Genres of Rhetoric

Probably one of the most foundational rhetorical categorisations that

journal article is often generated through the venue in it which it appears

little to do with objective logic but a lot to do with poetic enchantment.

spirit of the ad populum—the foundational paper of S-D logic has a vast

Style is fundamental to Western rhetoric. It helps to generate ethos and

Perhaps the most well-known of all the tropes is metaphor—“changing a

Metonymy & Synecdoche

Fahnestock (1999) writes of the “dominance of metaphor” in studies

note the regularity with which it is lumped together with metaphor in

oversimplifications and strategic lack of nuance), and so too is marketing

Repetition and Patterning

Moving on to the schemes, we might start with Lanham’s (1991) defini-

1 S-D Logic as Persuasive Discourse 1

2 Rhetorical Analysis and Marketing Texts 23

3 Rhetoric and the Agonistic Moment of S-D Logic 69

4 The Rhetorical Evolution of S-D Logic127

5 A Rhetorical Analysis of sdlogic.net169

6 The Rhetoric of Emerging Systems199

Table 4.1 Original FPs (Vargo & Lusch, 2004) 140

S-D Logic: Its Status as Marketing

A Few Words About Scope

The Structure of the Study

The Rhetor and the Rhetorical Analyst

hetorical Analysis as a Methodology

Non-Western Rhetorical Analysis

Key Rhetorical Concepts

The Genres of Rhetoric

Metonymy & Synecdoche

Repetition and Patterning

The Audiences of the Foundational Paper

hetorical History and the Creation

In the Beginning…

Stasis and Frames

Kairos and the Epideictic

The Place of Paradigm

The Shift to Logic

Logic, Metonymy, and Sympathetic Magic

Logos & Rhetorical Argumentation

Citations, Authority, and Originality

Claim 3 as Value Proposition

adical Precursors and Transcendent