Businesses deliver value to their stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders. Therefore, value creation is pivotal to management theory, but there is a lack of agreement amongst scholars about value at the conceptual level. This book uses invariant properties of human activities to develop a novel theory of value to help resolve controversies and integrate scholarship from different specialisms. To establish boundaries for the task of integration, business, management and organisation scholarship is identified as being an applied, supra-disciplinary mega-field. Its fragmented nature means that different academic fields, such as strategic management and marketing, approach the concept of value in distinct ways, based on their respective roots in economics and other social sciences. Tracing the evolution of ideas on value over time, a new theoretical framework is developed, the integrating theory of value co-creation, as an alternative to existing theories on value creation for individuals and organisations. The cornerstone of the integrating theory of value co-creation is that exchange is the fundamental basis for value co-creation, which enables it to cover both provider and customer perspectives. Given its interdisciplinary approach, this book will appeal to any social scientist interested in the management of organisations.
