Decision making and purpose of the actor in service systems

Abstract Purpose: - The purpose of the work is to contribute to the deepening of the knowledge concerning the emerging role, positions and identity of the actor in the environment, presenting the role of decision making and actor’s purpose. In order to go beyond the difficulties in separating the actors from the environment, the actantial model is used to explain the actor’s contextualization. Design/Methodology/approach: - the work is carried out by merging the VSA and the service science frameworks explaining the role of the decision making and the final purpose of the entities interacting in the environment. To contextualize the activities of the entities (actors) in the environment, semiotic frameworks and the actor-network theory are used, and the Greimas model is applied to the entity in the business context. Findings: - the actor emerges from the contextualization of an entity that assumes a role, a position and an identity caused by decision-making activities and explicit purpose. The Greimas model could be an original framework that is useful to represent the dynamics of the entities in the environment, in particular to merge together the decision-making activity, the purpose of every entity and the relationships between entity and context. Research limitations/implications - The conceptual approach developed in the paper should inevitably be further supported by empirical research. Nevertheless, the work could provide a first conceptual step for future research. Practical implications – Managers could be helped to understand the necessity to define the general purpose of the actors (companies) in which they operate looking for the opportunity to focus the attention on the relevance of the decision-making activities at every level of the organization. In particular the Greimas’ actantial model could be useful to ‘draw’ the context in which the organization operates and the characteristics of the system (company) dynamics. Originality: the work contributes to underlining the role of the decision maker, purpose of viability and contextualization of the entity/actor/system in business, marketing and management studies. In particular, the work brings a new point of view about entities contextualization highlighting the opportunity to study the system dynamics using actantial models.