Actor engagement in networks: defining the conceptual domain

Abstract

Considerable managerial and academic interest has made engagement a key priority in marketing and service research, spurring a rapidly increasing body of literature on this topic. Academic research initially explored customer engagement (CE) and customer engagement behavior within the firm-customer dyad. Recent developments suggest a need to broaden the conceptual domain of CE not only from the focal subject of customers/consumers to a general actor-to-actor perspective but also from the firm-customer dyad to relationships among multiple actors in service ecosystems. Hence, the purpose of this article is to bring a broadened definition to the conceptual domain of actor engagement (AE) in networks. Our theorizing process adopted a propositional conceptual approach that built on CE research and was guided by the general theoretical perspective of service-dominant logic. The critical contribution of the article lies in its systematic development of the conceptual domain of AE and the potential this development has for guiding knowledge development and cross-fertilization in various research fields, including customer, work, citizen, and business engagement. We provide a definition of AE and five fundamental propositions that embody a broader network perspective of engagement and conclude by discussing an agenda for future research that illustrates its managerial relevance.