How ‘little murders’ affect the sustainability of knowledge renewal

Introduction (Reasoning)
The idea of relation economics come up by Zuboff and Maxmin (2002) seems connected to S-D logic, because of its main idea that the power shifts to the customers. As a result, it interests me to explore whether the four forms of ‘little murders’ would be applicable for the practical issue of value co-creation. Because of the page limitation, I am going to focus on the knowledge renewal which is one of the enablers of value-creating activities according to Ballantyne and Varey (2006, p. 342) Knowledge renewal deals with the issues about how knowledge is created, applied and shared within firms,or with suppliers and customers (p. 340), which could be regarded as a self-sustaining mechanism. Although Brown and Duguid (2001, p.209) has mentioned stickiness and leakiness of knowledge from the aspects of internal divisions and external connections as potential problems when a company is coordinated around knowledge and applications . Personally, leakiness and stickiness are more about the demerits inherent in the nature of knowledge. By contrast, the barriers of applying relationship economics refers more about the economic or financial environment. The next section is to analyse how the ‘little murders’ affect knowledge.

Zuboff and Maxmin (2002, p.194) introduced four deeds resulting in the destruction of relationship value. They are starvation, inflation, tyranny and mimicry. First, the inflation inflation gives rise to limited budget for operating knowledge renewal. The former one deals with prioritizing to lessen the cost and resources applied in the ‘front line’ of organization where staff and end customers encounter (p. 195). The limitation of cost investing to establish and maintain relationship between firms and customers gives rise to the worse quality of service