Zooming in VS zooming out on value co-creation: Consequences for BtoB research Julie Leroy a,1 , Bernard Cova b, ⁎, Robert Salle c,2 a IAE de la Réunion, 24-26 Avenue de la Victoire, 97400 Saint-Denis, Réunion, France b Kedge Business School Marseille & Visiting Professor Bocconi University Milan, Domaine de Luminy, BP 921, 13288 Marseille Cedex 9, France c E.M. Lyon Business School, OCE Research Center, 23, Av Guy de Collongue, BP 174, 69132 Lyon Ecully Cedex, France abstract article info Article history: Received 29 November 2012 Received in revised form 19 June 2013 Accepted 3 July 2013 Available online xxxx Keywords: Black box Scale of observation Service dominant logic Value co-creation Zizo 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 con- cept presumes to encompass. To achieve this, we analyze a selection of articles published in special issues of mar- keting 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 con- troversy alive. © 2013 Published by Elsevier Inc. 1. Introduction It is acknowledged that researchers need to switch lenses for studying the many aspects of an organizational phenomenon (Nicolini, 2009); they do that by alternatively looking at the macro picture (zooming out) and looking at the micro picture (zooming in) of the phenomenon under con- sideration (Moss Kanter, 2011). To zoom out is to consider the essential points rather than the finer details of a phenomenon; this approach thus searches for commonalities between phenomena. Zooming in exam- ines more closely, or in greater detail; the focus is on the specifics of a phe- nomenon. The former approach, which is conventional in nearly any other scientific community, has only recently been revived in the field of marketing by Vargo and Lusch (2008b, 2011), who advocate zooming out to gain a more comprehensive perspective on economic exchanges and market theory. This approach revisits Levitt's critics (1960) of the fact that the vision of most organizations is too constricted by a narrow understanding of what business they are in. As the primary tool for zooming out, the authors have proposed the conceptual framework which they created and have continued to develop since 2004 in the con- text of service-dominant logic (SDL): that of value co-creation through mutual service provision between actors (actor-to-actor or A2A). Their work is quite valuable and has given rise to the possibility of exploring potential cross-fertilization among concepts, models, and theories in marketing and other related disciplines. However, the fact that the founders of this movement have quickly become both the orig- inators and champions of a theory that has dominated in the field of marketing and become ubiquitous in academic journals – nearly achiev- ing the status of an academic brand (Cova, Ford, & Salle, 2009) – presents a risk that the movement has been granted premature immunity to con- troversy or even reasonable scrutiny. Indeed, the originators of SDL (Vargo & Lusch, 2004) have attained a towering status, enabling them to prescribe a convenient framework for researchers to conceptualize reality for the entire discipline. This proposition thus has the potential to lock the ‘zizo’ movement (i.e., zooming in/zooming out, as termed by Van Mele, 2006) in the zoom-out position, effectively making value co-creation a ‘black box’ (Latour, 1987) – a scientific statement that is treated as fact and is exempted from close examination – despite this never having been the authors' intent. To develop further our argument, we refer to Kjellberg and Helgesson's work on generic performativity. They link two worlds, one of abstract practices that can be compared to the zoom out position, and one of concrete practices. The inherent risk of producing mainly zooming out research is to lose touch with the everyday practices of firms by focusing on polishing abstract, zooming out practices. Indeed, the success or failure at implementing a service dominant strategy is determined by the details of the service deliv- ery process. If the research community loses track of these details (i.e. zooming in the concrete practices) the link between the two worlds will be cut, thus producing a pure abstracted black box. The aim of this article is to prevent the premature ‘black-boxization’ of the concept of value co-creation by confronting what this discipline has produced thus far in order to highlight the breadth of situations that this concept presumes to encompass. Because value co-creation is Industrial Marketing Management xxx (2013) xxx–xxx ⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +33 491 827 946. E-mail addresses: julie_leroy@hotmail.com (J. Leroy), bernard.cova@kedgebs.com (B. Cova), salle@em-lyon.com (R. Salle). 1 Tel.: +262 262 21 16 26. 2 Tel.: +33 478 337 774. IMM-06905; No of Pages 10 0019-8501/$ – see front matter © 2013 Published by Elsevier Inc. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2013.07.006 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Industrial Marketing Management Please cite this article as: Leroy, J., et al., Zooming in VS zooming out on value co-creation: Consequences for BtoB research, Industrial Marketing Management (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2013.07.006