Summary In this paper, in order to examine service development as practice, we draw on extensive ethnographic material covering an entire service development process. Through a rhetorical lens, we identify what types of customer-related arguments the project members use in order to drive the...

This paper provides a reading of mainstream academic marketing discourse based upon Foucault's concept of governmentality. Three periods of marketing thought are identified, described and analyzed--'early marketing thought' (c. 1900-1960), 'marketing management' (c. 1950-1985) and 'service...