Zooming in VS zooming out on value co-creation: Consequences for BtoB research

The concept of value co-creation is now taken for granted in the marketing community. It is the result of what we consider as a premature closure of this concept. The aim of this article is to prevent this premature closure by confronting what this discipline has produced thus far in order to highlight the breadth of situations that this concept presumes to encompass. To achieve this, we analyze a selection of articles published in special issues of marketing journals that were dedicated to value co-creation and/or service dominant logic. This sample enables us to point to the risks of being locked into a zoom-out approach to economic exchange: an arbitrary reduction of the vast heterogeneity of exchange phenomena and an inability to account for the complexity of these phenomena. Because value co-creation is a conception that is in conflict with the zoom-in approach to exchange phenomena, our intent is to conduct a healthy rebalancing of perspectives on economic exchange and thereby keep the controversy alive.