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The dynamic capabilities framework has been used to explain how firms successfully adapt to changing environments. However, tensions exist in the literature surrounding the idiosyncratic, tacit and hence inimitable nature of dynamic capabilities. The literature struggles to explain in cognitivist terms how such firm capabilities are acquired in the first instance. In this paper, we argue that a firm's dynamic capabilities rest upon a tacitly-shared substrate of sensitivities and predispositions that precede cognitive representation. These sensitivities and predispositions are typically transmitted and shared unconsciously through social practices rather than through formal instruction. They provide the microfoundational substrate of capabilities that enable a firm to effectively respond by orienting its members towards external environmental challenges in a manner unique to the firm's history. Such sensitivities and predispositions provide an organizational modus operandi for members to reconfigure capabilities and resources and to capitalize on the opportunities arising therefrom.

Debates on theory have focused on the nature of good theories and the process of theorizing, but have failed to engage with the ontology of becoming emphasized by process philosophers such as Heraclitus, Bergson and James, and more recently by Cooper, Shotter and Chia. This paper argues that engaging with reality as becoming implies departing from any claims of `essence' in theories. Theories are not representations, better or worse, of a particular phenomenon, real or socially constructed. Instead, mobility, movement and creativity are the primordial qualities of theory. A becoming ontology also points to the non-sequential, imaginative and paradoxical `way' of theory-building. This paper argues that a processual approach which is reposed on introspective reality and the method of intuition is better suited to revealing a becoming reality.

Drawing on a detailed reading of the work of Peppers and Rogers (1993, this paper argues that their work offers an emblematic problematization of traditional mass marketing, which articulates a new mentality of marketing -collaborative marketing. Collaborative marketing, implemented through the practices of CRM, reframes the role and identity of the individual consumer within producer-consumer relationships, transforming them from sovereign chooser to active collaborator, or as they are termed here, reflexive consumers. Using Foucault's concept of governmentality the paper articulates the achievement of this transformation and the central role of reflexivity in this transformation of the consumer. We conclude that in redefining the nature of marketing, RM and CRM form new relays of power linking producer and consumer and that these relays re-interpret the antagonism between freedom and subjugation that lie at the heart of producer-consumer relationships.

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