My Academic Role Model: Jonas Holmqvist

guest article by Jonas Holmqvist

When my good friend Matthew Alexander nominated me to write about two of my academic role models, I immediately knew which two important role models in my career I would write about. Both are frequent co-authors of mind, and both have influenced me a lot.

The first is my supervisor Christian Grönroos. Christian was not just my PhD supervisor; he was also the supervisor of my Master’s Thesis and he taught several of my courses when I was a student. In fact, already as a first-year student, I approached Christian to ask about a future PhD, something he remembers well and has brought up many times. It is safe to say that nobody else has shaped my academic path more than Christian has. As I do not need to elaborate Christian’s expertise in research to fellow service researchers who know him as one of the founders of our discipline, I instead want to focus on Christian as a person, after more than twenty years as his student, PhD student, and co-author. 

First, Christian has always been very open to new ideas and different ideas. For example, on Christian’s suggestion, I started my PhD on the topic of value in services but after my first year I had grown bored of it. I went to Christian and suggested a different topic I had come up with, language use in services. Many supervisors might have been reluctant to completely changing thesis topic, but Christian enthusiastically supported it. Similarly, when I decided to change the focus of all my papers from the qualitative approach then dominating at Hanken to a quantitative research approach, Christian again offered his full support. In hindsight, I realize that this willingness to let PhD students follow their own paths rather than moulding them in one’s own form is rather rare, and something I appreciate a lot.

Next, there is often a saying that “academia needs both good researchers and good teachers”. I have always disliked this saying for its underlying implication that good researchers are not good pedagogues, and I always use Christian as an example to counter it. Christian has an amazing talent of making his courses engaging, fun, interesting and in-depth; as a student I found his courses my favourite ones. Later on, as an academic myself, I have tried to implement the same approach as Christian in my classes, so Christian’s influence on my academic path extends to both teaching and research.

Last but certainly not least, on a more personal level, Christian is a great person to sit down and talk to over a coffee, beer or wine. Interestingly enough, we then almost never talk about research or academia – Christian is very much a man of culture, with whom discussions can range from history to music to literature. He has a sharp wit and great sense of humour, so discussions with him are always enjoyable. 

For my second role model, I was equally sure that I would write about my frequent co-author Jochen Wirtz. I first met Jochen in conferences, but it was in 2018 that Jochen attended my presentation at La Londe about the value process in luxury services and afterwards immediately suggested we start working on the topic of luxury services together – a topic on which we have already published a number of articles since 2020 and continue to work together on several new projects.

Jochen’s ability to engage with a paper and improve it is nothing short of spectacular. A common friend once asked me “Does Jochen ever sleep?” and I must admit the question makes sense. Whereas some famous academics might not always engage much in every research project, Jochen pours his soul into every project. Knowing how many projects Jochen is involved in every year with different co-authors, this engagement is nothing short of spectacular. Every time we work together, he will engage with every aspect until the paper is at the level it should be, and he has a wonderful talent of both identifying the weaknesses and possible paths forward. 

As an example of how engaged Jochen is in his articles, I have an anecdote that stuck with me. Recently, we attended an alumni event at NUS in Singapore and Jochen talked about our article ‘Luxury Services’ with a few alumni. It is now more than five years since we submitted the final version of it – but for Jochen, it could have been yesterday. Without a moment of hesitation, he explained every contribution of the paper and all its defining concepts to the alumni. The fact that Jochen has published around 50 articles in the five years since we published ‘Luxury Services’ and still had every aspect of the article fresh in his mind offers a glimpse into the extent to which he always engages with all of our projects. 

Much as with Christian, Jochen is also a warm, social and outgoing person who is always very supportive and appears to have time for everyone to discuss. Jochen is someone with whom it is easy to talk for hours, and – also like Christian – with a very wide range of cultural knowledge and interests, meaning discussion can cover almost every topic. I recently had the pleasure of visiting NUS Business School in Singapore for a few weeks, and Jochen was a wonderful host who took the time for both numerous research discussions and social events.

I am very grateful for these two important role models in my academic career and the influence they have both had on me. To conclude, I would like to nominate another good friend, Christian Kowalkowski, to write about his role models.

Jonas Holmqvist
Associate Professor of Marketing,
Kedge Business School,
Bordeaux, France.

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