OURNAL OF MACROMARKETING Services in Society and Academic Thought: An Historical Analysis

The science of marketing focuses on exchange relationships (Hunt 1991) is based on explanatory concepts inherited from economics more than a century ago. Classical and neoclassical economics look at relationships among supply, demand, and value of tangible goods, especially manufactured goods. This limited focus, in turn, is rooted in the philosophical and scientific thought that preceded the development of economic science as well as in the intentional limited purposes of its early scholars. The focus of marketing has shifted from tangible goods and activities associated with their delivery to include the exchange of activities (i.e., service provision). The growing interest in services has been attributed in part to the existence of a structural shift in mature economies from productiondominant toward services-dominant economic activity, labeled the “post-industrial society” (see, e.g., Bell 1953; Noyelle 1983) and the “services economy” (e.g., Giarini and Stahel 1989; Riddle 1986). Others posit that the shift is related to practitioners’ interest in human relations aspects of “product differentiation” (Berry and Parasuraman 1993) and the view that “goods” do not characterize all of exchange (Shostack 1977). Given marketing’s foundation in economic science, this shift has given rise to a dichotomy in the way we think about what is exchanged. That is, since marketing is grounded in the inherited notion that the unit of exchange is goods, services must be a different type of good or “intangible product.” Services thus became defined residually—services are what agriculture, extracted, and manufactured commodities are not. Therefore, early research on services focused on the explication of these differences (e.g., Zeithaml, Parasuraman, and Berry 1985). This dichotomy has led to the creation of a subdiscipline of services marketing. We argue that this dichotomy limits our fully understanding exchange processes (Shostack 1977; Vargo and Lusch 2004a). Service is more than merely what goods are not. Service represents activities that provide benefits for another party, and these activities are primarily what are exchanged in markets. Some of these activities result in goods, or appliances, that derive their value through service provision. Thus the purposes of this article are to reexamine economic activity, the role of service, and the goods versus service question from a historical and a service perspective. We suggest that the present dichotomy is an artifact of the governing paradigm rather than the result of empirical or rational analysis. From this perspective, we conclude that service activities emerge as essential ingredients of the economic interdependence that we call civilization (Bastiat [1848] 1964; Riddle 1986). We argue that service, rather than goods, is the common denominator in exchange. The historical perspective presented herein