Exploring the perceived value of social practice theories for business-to-business marketing managers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose Drawing on sociological theories of Giddens, Bourdieu and Goffman, the purpose of this paper is to explore how different relationships are characterized between actors in interaction and determine whether social theories of practice resonate as being practical to managers. Design/methodology/approach In the empirical investigations, the authors employ the Delphi method whereby the authors “elevate” six highly experienced marketing practitioners in Dubai and Bangkok, each in different industries and from different cultural backgrounds, to designated “expert” positions in exploring the practical relevance of the practice-based theories of Bourdieu, the dramaturgy of Goffman and the structuration theory of Giddens in understanding practical experiences of managing in business-to-business networks. Findings The results show that aspects of these theories are consistent with practitioners’ experiences in many ways but the theories themselves do not appear to resonate with the modernist practical consciousness of the participants as being particularly pragmatic or practically useful except as resources they could selectively borrow from as bricoleurs of changing action. Originality/value Social practice theories appear rather too abstract and complex to practical actors. It is therefore paradoxical that social practice theories do not appear as sufficiently “handy” or “ready to hand” in Heidegger’s (1962) terms; being in need of translation into practical usefulness. It would appear that social practice theories can be a useful analytical vehicle for the academic analyst but cannot resonate with the modernist consciousness of the practical actor.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.056 | 0.061 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".