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.