Some philosophical problems for service-dominant logic in marketing

Vargo and Lusch (2004, 2008, 2009) developed a synthesis of service-dominant logic and called for a major shift towards service thinking, which has been well received by the academic marketing community. However the arguments to date have overlooked issues of testability, over-explanation, and normative power, and they are undermined by a definitional slide in the justification of service-dominant logic. We discuss these issues and suggest that they may create problems for service-dominant logic in its current form. We call for further conceptual development to address these points, and to enable discriminative tests between alternative service-based interventions. (C) 2012 Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.