{"id":11627,"date":"2022-02-24T19:50:49","date_gmt":"2022-02-25T00:50:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/?p=11627"},"modified":"2023-08-11T03:04:47","modified_gmt":"2023-08-11T07:04:47","slug":"maria-holmlund-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/2022\/02\/maria-holmlund-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting to know: Maria Holmlund(-Rytk\u00f6nen) \u2014 Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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For our \u201cGetting to know\u201d series<\/a>, Hugo Guyader interviewed Maria Holmlund. This is the first part of the interview.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maria is a professor of marketing at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland, and has been a part of the Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management (CERS) since its beginning in 1994. She obtained her PhD in Business Administration from Hanken in 1998, became a professor in 2008 and was shortly thereafter selected as the head of the marketing department. She served in that position for six years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s ask her a few questions about her career in service research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Your PhD thesis is titled \u2018Perceived Quality in Business Relationships\u2019, and you have since published many papers on relationship marketing and business networks. Is that where your interest in service research comes from \u2014 from B2B markets and servitisation?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

During my undergraduate studies at Hanken, there were two marketing courses that I particularly liked: one was Industrial Marketing and Purchasing, and the other course was Qualitative Methods. This was, oddly enough, after I decided to not choose finance, which was my alternative, as my major \u2013 I finally ended up having marketing as my major and economics and the German language as my minors. In those days, the focus on service research was in its initial phase in our department and, believe it or not, we did not have any service marketing courses back then. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, my interest in B2B marketing and relationships and network management came first, before my interest in service marketing. I am from and studied in Vaasa, where Hanken also operates today. Vaasa is located in a region on the western coast of Finland known for its strong entrepreneurial spirit and many globally recognised B2B companies, such as ABB and W\u00e4rtsil\u00e4. I did my bachelor\u2019s thesis on W\u00e4rtsil\u00e4 and my master\u2019s thesis on ABB, or Str\u00f6mberg, as the company was called back then. The servitisation that you mention is a more recent concept, and I find it close to what my core area of interest is \u2013 that is, service- and customer-oriented business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do you see these two areas relating to one other? (Do people from the B2B and service communities mix well?)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think that the topics of B2B and service go extremely well together. Just think of the servitisation \u2018movement\u2019 as an example of this. Many researchers are active in both communities, and I don\u2019t think there is any reason to expect less cross-fertilisation or overlap in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking of the future and where is the field going… What are the most relevant trends nowadays that you think will have an influence on marketing\/service research?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trends are difficult to forecast, but it is easy to predict that topics that have a genuine impact on society \u2013 be they particular local issues or large-scale global challenges \u2013 or that address concurrent, crucial company challenges will thrive. The pandemic has already accelerated some of them and introduced a couple of new topics. And, I strongly believe that sustainability and ethics, alongside technological developments, continue to offer fruitful and relevant research avenues for all sorts of scholars. I would also like to see a parallel trend with more theoretical understanding and practical tool development related to financial aspects, such as financial wellbeing and how companies and society can promote such soundness. Another trend I see in marketing\/service research relates to data and method possibilities. There are more kinds of data available than ever before, and they could enable more varied kinds of insights than ever before, provided we pose the \u2018right and relevant\u2019 questions and develop \u2018proper and sound\u2019 methods and analysis. So, I think the broad area of data and insight management will offer abundant opportunities for theoretically and managerially relevant service research. All of us will have plenty to do for a long time \u2013 there is no doubt about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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You are an international fellow at CTF in Karlstad, Sweden, as well as a long-time member of the Nordic Workshop on Relationship Dissolution\/later Dynamics (NoRD). What are the (dis)advantages of being a Nordic researcher?  <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CTF<\/a> and CERS<\/a> have been sister service centres since they were founded. I visited Karlstad for one of my first PhD courses in the 90s \u2013 the theme being service management, of course \u2013 and have since then been back many times. I have regular exchange of different kinds with CTF researchers and Karlstad University. So, I am proud to have been awarded the International Fellow Award.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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NoRD is another and much smaller and informal kind of research community that had its first bi-annual workshop in 2000. I was one of the founders. We originally wanted to gather researchers interested in relationship dissolution from different backgrounds using different methods. After a while, we broadened the scope to relationship dynamics, and by now, we have organised quite a few inspiring, fun and rewarding gatherings in the Nordic countries with participants from all over the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is the \u2018Nordic School\u2019 (cf. Fares’ inspiration for PhD studies<\/a>)?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many publications on what the Nordic School of Service is. For example, the edited book by Johanna Gummerus and Catharina von Koskull that was published in 2015 and that is available online gives a good overview of it (The Nordic School: Service Marketing and Management for the Future<\/a><\/em>). For me, the Nordic School refers to research about topical phenomena in society and the business world, and developing understanding relevant for research and practice about those phenomena using any method and data. What I consider advantages, and what seems to be more common, to my mind, in Nordic business schools than elsewhere is that gaining access to companies and working with them is easier and more routine, and that we have more female professors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You are a woman succeeding in an academic world that is dominated by men. Has this been of a strong influence throughout your career?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you mean whether I have experienced discrimination based on gender, I would not say that I have. In our department, which has two specialties, marketing as well as supply chain management and social responsibility, more than half of the professors are women. Women also make up more than half of the whole faculty. Participants at many conferences I have attended in the B2B and service areas have been fairly equally distributed gender-wise too. Still, I understand what you are hinting at, but I have been lucky enough to not have experienced any discrimination personally. I contribute whenever I can in different committees to promote gender equality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Maria Holmlund-Rytk\u00f6nen
Professor of Marketing and Dean of Programmes and Quality Assurance,
Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management (CERS),
Hanken School of Economics (Helsinki, Finland).

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Interview – Part 2 here<\/a>.


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For our \u201cGetting to know\u201d series, Hugo Guyader interviewed Maria Holmlund. This is the first part of the interview. Maria is a professor of marketing at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland, and has been a part of the Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management (CERS) since its beginning in 1994. She obtained her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":11714,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,10],"tags":[39,509,881],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11627"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11627"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13001,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11627\/revisions\/13001"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}