E-commerce Managers at Work : Exploring the Role of a New Market Actor

Abstract (Swedish)

Digitalization is shaping the discipline and practice of marketing. Not only does digitalization shape how we shop and consume everything from music to food and mobility services (Cochoy, Hagberg, McIntyre, & Sörum, 2017; Fuentes, Hagberg, & Kjellberg, 2019; Guyader, 2018; Schneider & Eli, 2022), but it has also fundamentally transformed the practices of marketing. Digitalization has changed the way we organize stores, how we collect data on consumers, the way we present products, as well as our modes of post-purchase interactions (Hagberg, Sundstrom, & Egels-Zandén, 2016; Puntoni, Reczek, Giesler, & Botti, 2021).
These new digitalized markets are also populated by new market actors with new identities and supposedly new capabilities. Social media marketers, marketing data analysis, growth hackers, and digitalized consumers have emerged as a result of the merging of digital technologies and marketing practices.
Although the emergence of these new digitalized market actors has been noted and often attributed great importance, there are few studies exploring how these actors are shaped and what it is that they do (Ryan, Stigzelius, Mejri, Hopkinson, & Hussien, 2023). While digitalized consumers have received considerable attention both within and outside of marketing, digitalized marketing practitioners have remained underexplored (Hafezieh, Pollock, & Ryan, 2023).
In this paper, we address this paucity by exploring the formation of one of these actors: the e-commerce manager. E-commerce managers have gained prominence in the last decades, described as increasingly consequential in both research and industry discourse. However, while attributed great importance there are few in-depth studies of this new market actor. We therefore know very little about how these new digitalized market actors are constituted, what they can do, or how their constitution and capabilities vary across contexts.
Our aim is to explore and conceptualize the various ways in which e-commerce managers are configured as market actors and how their configuration shapes and is shaped by the marketing practices they perform.
We assume, and will later show, that there is not one way to be an e-commerce manager but that there is considerable agential variation behind this label. We take therefore an interest in the configuration of e-commerce actors as practitioners with varied agential capacities (Hagberg & Kjellberg, 2010).
We take a socio-material practice approach, conceptualizing the process of actor configuration as the result of practices. We will argue that the relationship between marketing actors and marketing practices is recursive. The performance of marketing practices is dependent not only on a carrier but a performer of practices. Conversely, as these practices are performed, the actor is configured, made through the associations created between the various elements involved in the practice(s). This approach will allow us to explore e-commerce managers as socio-material actors whose agency is not determined by their competence alone but also, and at times mainly, by the networks of devices and people they form part of. It will also allow us to explore the variety of actors and capabilities that take shape under the homogenous label of e-commerce managers.
Empirically, the analysis draws on an ethnographically inspired study of 20 e-commerce managers working across industries and under different conditions. Ethnographic interviews combined with shadowing observations on a selection of participants make up the empirical material.
The preliminary analysis indicates that e-commerce managers are shaped as a specific type of market actor – with both specific agency and identity – as a result of two groups of practices. On the one hand e-commerce managers are made in and through the marketing practices they perform as part of their everyday work as e-commerce managers. That is, they are shaped as actors in and through a vast array of everyday marketing practices that range from the more strategic actions or setting up goals and deciding on what markets to enter to the more everyday work of developing and overseeing customer service and delivery.
Second, e-commerce managers are also developed through a set of practices specifically aiming at developing e-commerce managers as market actors. These practices include a) readings reports, attending seminars, and conferences, b) developing and maintaining their networks of “partners”, and c) presenting themselves by giving talks and presentations, and maintaining contact with media and researchers.
In our analysis, we argue and show, how e-commerce managers – do different types – are performed through a combination of these two types of practices. What is more, these two sets of practices are interconnected and their relationship with the e-commerce manager as actor reciprocal. While performing marketing practices of different sorts they are also enacted through these practices, changing in turn their capacity to act.


References
Cochoy, F., Hagberg, J., McIntyre, M. P., & Sörum, N. (Eds.). (2017). Digitalizing Consumption: how devices shape consumer culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Fuentes, C., Hagberg, J., & Kjellberg, H. (2019). Soundtracking: Music listening practices in the digital age. European Journal of Marketing, 53 (3), 483-503.
Guyader, H. (2018). No one rides for free! Three styles of collaborative consumption. Journal of Services Marketing, 32(6), 692–714.
Hafezieh, N., Pollock, N., & Ryan, A. (2023). “Hacking marketing”: how do firms develop marketers’ expertise and practices in a digital era? Journal of Enterprise Information Management.
Hagberg, J., & Kjellberg, H. (2010). Who performs marketing? Dimensions of agential variation in market practice. Industrial Marketing Management, 39(6), 1028-1037.
Hagberg, J., Sundstrom, M., & Egels-Zandén, N. (2016). The digitalization of retailing: an exploratory framework. International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, 44(7), 694-712.
Puntoni, S., Reczek, R. W., Giesler, M., & Botti, S. (2021). Consumers and Artificial Intelligence: An Experiential Perspective. Journal of Marketing, 85(1), 131-151.
Ryan, A., Stigzelius, I., Mejri, O., Hopkinson, G., & Hussien, F. (2023). Agencing the digitalised marketer: Exploring the boundary workers at the cross-road of (e)merging markets. Marketing Theory.
Schneider, T., & Eli, K. (2022). The digital labor of ethical food consumption: a new research agenda for studying everyday food digitalization. Agriculture and Human Values.

• author: Fuentes, Christian ; Bäckström, Kristina ; Wulff, Gabriella and Stoopendahl, Patrik
• organization: Centre for Retail Research at Lund University; Department of Service Studies
• publishing date: 2024-11-07
• type: Contribution to conference
• publication status: published
• subject: Business Administration
• conference name: Nordic Retail and Wholesale Conference
• conference location: Helsingborg, Sweden
• conference dates: 2024-11-05 - 2024-11-07
• language: Swedish
• LU publication?: yes
• id: e59ec551-6167-4145-87a4-a6ecd2eb1590
• date added to LUP: 2025-03-28 15:25:28
• date last changed: 2025-05-26 13:46:29