Marketing research highlights the importance of actors’ relationships as mechanisms for integrating resources. With its roots in sociology, the concept of embeddedness has gained prominence in the literature on organizations, providing in-depth insight into how relational structures regulate resource integration processes and outcomes. However, the concept of an actor’s embeddedness is rarely discussed in association with service-dominant (S-D) logic. This limits the extant understanding of factors that influence resource exchange and value cocreation among individual actors in service ecosystems. Against this background, this article links S-D logic with social capital theory to establish and conceptualize embeddedness as a key concept. More specifically, this research identifies and delineates structural, relational, and cultural properties of embeddedness and offers a systematic and complementary theoretical understanding to better explain relational constellations based on actors’ resource integration potential. In so doing, this research significantly advances marketing science and particularly the S-D logic school of thought by explicitly clarifying the role of embeddedness and its implications for resource integration. A set of research propositions is presented laying the foundation for future research.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	Embeddedness, resource integration, S-D logic, social capital theory, value cocreation
Research Division:	Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services
Research Group:	Marketing
Research Field:	Marketing theory
Objective Division:	Commercial Services and Tourism
Objective Group:	Property, business support services and trade
Objective Field:	Property, business support services and trade not elsewhere classified
UTAS Author:	Laud, G (Dr Gauri Laud)
ID Code:	110927
Year Published:	2015
Web of Science® Times Cited:	50
Deposited By:	TSBE
Deposited On:	2016-08-23
Last Modified:	2018-02-08
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