- Title
- Value-in-use creation through resource integration: an exploratory study of international doctoral students
- Creator
- Ghavami, Sara
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Globalization is spreading. People are mobilized, companies operate internationally and people are being accustomed to interact with diverse cultures on a daily basis. One manifestation of the phenomena is the increasing trend of students travelling abroad and the growing international higher education industry that follows. The value of international education for students can have both academic and non-academic outcomes that derive from a range of experiences. Accordingly, universities need to expand their perspectives from seeing themselves as only knowledge and education providers to being centres that facilitate students’ broader experiences. The theory of value-in-use creation posits that customers are focal agents who create value by integrating resources drawn from the firm (i.e. the products), the environment and themselves. This alternate view of a customer is different to traditional views where firms create value for customers. This study utilises this alternate view and considers its implications in the context of international higher education in Australia. This study investigated the resource integration process undertaken by international PhD students, encompassing their academic and non-academic lower-level goals and the resources used to achieve those goals were identified. The aim of this study was to explain how international PhD students create value-in-use through the resource integration process. The study employed an exploratory case-study qualitative research method to achieve the aim of the research. Interviews were conducted with 27 international PhD students at The University of Newcastle. The results suggest existing models of resource integration do not adequately capture key elements of the resource integration process evident in the lives of students examined in this case study. A more comprehensive model drawn purely from the customers’ perspective is presented and a set of related propositions are discussed to explain how resource integration occurs among international PhD students in this study. The findings contribute to the theory of value-in-use creation by describing the component parts of the process of customer’s resource integration process, known as a black box in the literature. In addition, the results provide The University of Newcastle’s managers and decision-makers with more comprehensive insights into how they may better engage as facilitators in supporting students as customers actively engaged in a resource integration process.
- Subject
- value-in-use; customer experience; service dominant logic; customer dominant logic; resource integration; usage process; qualitative research; value co-creation
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1394355
- Identifier
- uon:33685
- Rights
- Copyright 2018 Sara Ghavami
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 2 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 137 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |