An important issue for the emergent discipline of organizational neuroscience is to determine the levels of analysis at which its explanations of behavior may be properly directed. Four such levels may be proposed as appropriate to the explanation of behavior in terms of neurophysiological and environmental (reinforcing and punishing) events: the sub-personal level of exposition refers to neurophysiological events; the personal level, to the beliefs, desires and other intentional idioms that are ascribed to the individual to account for his/her behavior; the super-personal level to the environmental influences that shape and maintain behavior (i.e., reinforcers and punishers); and the supra-personal level to the emergent behavior of an organization such as the firm.

Any explanation of behavior in terms of the sub-personal level of neuronal activity (Dennett, 1969), enjoins methodological individualism as a philosophy of science on its practitioners. After all, the neurophysiology of an individual can enter into the explanation of the behavior of that person alone. However, while the behavioral analysis of individual members of organizations proceeds well enough in neurophysiological terms, it is sometimes necessary to understand and predict the behavior of the organization as a whole. Even explanations of behavior based on radical behaviorist models have recently embraced the idea that an organization might be treated as a contextual or operant system in its own right, its behavior predictable from those of its outputs that are over and above the joint consequences of the behaviors of its members (Glenn, 1991, 2004; Foxall, 1999a; Glenn and Malott, 2004; Biglan and Glenn, 2013). How far is it feasible to construct such an account of organizational behavior on the basis of neurophysiological knowledge?

This may constitute an abstraction too far for traditional behavior analysts for whom the individual organism is the sole bearer of behavior that is to be environmentally explained; but at least the behavioral outputs of supra-individual entities such as organizations are identifiable by intersubjective agreement. The same cannot be said of sub-personal events which are employed in organizational neuroscience to explain the behavior of individual managers; although the effects of such events may be demonstrated under highly-restrictive laboratory conditions, their application in the interpretation of the complex behaviors that characterize human interactions in organizations requires some ground rules for the explanation of personal level behavior by means of inferred sub-personal occurrences.

Since the marketing firm is conceptualized as an organization whose existence is closely tied up with the satisfaction of consumer wants, the analysis of consumer behavior is a prerequisite of the corporate-level investigation appropriate to the marketing firm. The behavior of consumers is depicted comparatively easily in neuroscientific terms because each consumer can be treated as an individual; this enables analysis to embrace the personal level of analysis which harmonizes with the possibility that sub-personal (neuronal) events within the organism may play a causal role in explaining the organism's behavior. When we consider the behavior of an individual in terms of the super-personal causal texture provided by the consequences of behavior, that is when we consider the individual to be a contextual or operant system, we can specify once again how the persistence of this behavior is influenced by the reinforcing and punishing outcomes it produces. A recent extension of this idea is that the behavior of organizations can be predicted and explained by considering them in their entirety as “contextual systems.” A contextual system is an entity the behavior of which can be predicted and explained by reference to its learning history and its current behavior setting; that is by the consequences that have followed its behaviors in the past as they interact with current opportunities to repeat similar behaviors or to engage in competing activities (Foxall, 1999b). This basic assumption of the concept of the marketing firm (Foxall, 1999a), has also been incorporated into behavior analytic thinking through the analysis of metacontingencies (e.g., Biglan and Glenn, 2013).

A complication arises, however, if we seek to apply neuroscientific thinking to the behavior of a supra-personal entity such as a firm or other organization. There is no analog in the organization of the neuronal firing in terms of which individual behavior can be construed. It is, therefore, necessary to deal not with the organization as a neurological unit but with the individual members of the organization whose behavior may be understood by reference to the behavior of other organizational members or external actors. This paper is concerned, nevertheless, to explore the implications of this in order to assess the contribution of organizational neuroscience to the explanation not only of individual managers and consumers, but to the interactions of the marketing firm and its consumerate¹. The key to this lies in the bilateral contingencies that these interactions create and maintain (Foxall, 2014a).

Although marketing management is generally understood as a response to the demands of the marketplace, it is unusual for a theory of managerial marketing to proceed in similar terms to those in which the underlying theory of consumer choice is couched. The research program encompassing the Behavioral Perspective Model of consumer behavior (BPM: Foxall, 1990/2004, 2013) and the Theory of the Marketing Firm (TMF: Foxall, 1999a), which employ interfacing operant models, attempts to address this inconsistency. Both models and the interactions they posit have received empirical support in research that has focused on the behavior of the marketing firm as a whole in relation to other firms in the market ².

This paper proposes and explores a level of analysis that has not previously featured in studies of the marketing firm, namely the neuropsychological and neuroeconomic implications of the completion of successful exchanges with the firm's consumers. The emerging discipline of organizational neuroscience (e.g., Butler and Senior, 2007a,b; Lee and Chamberlain, 2007; Lee et al., 2007; Becker and Cropanzano, 2010) provides a general framework for this analysis, which is extended by the incorporation of some aspects of neuroeconomics to capture the economic and social exchange relationships that characterize marketer-consumer relationships. While the behavior of consumers has been explicated in terms of its neurophysiological underpinnings (Foxall, 2008, 2011), those of managerial and non-managerial firm members have not yet been characterized in this way. The BPM/TMF framework proceeds in terms of operant psychology and operant behavioral economics and it is within this disciplinary matrix that the present paper is constructed. However, the close relationship between reinforcement learning and the operation of the dopaminergic reward prediction error (RPE) system provides an additional reason for undertaking a neuroeconomic analysis of behavior in operant terms (Stanton et al., 2010; Caplin and Glimcher, 2013; Daw, 2013; Daw and Tobler, 2013). This paper therefore examines the activities of mangers conceived in operant terms. Although the paper focuses on managerial rather than non-managerial organizational behavior, motivation of the latter is implicit in its treatment of the former since a central component of managerial behavior involves the management of other members of the firm whose motivation must be taken into account.

The paper describes the BPM and TMF approaches before examining in greater detail than hitherto the nature of the bilateral contingencies that link consumer behavior and marketing management. Three levels of analysis of bilateral contingencies are proposed, referring respectively to market-exchange relationships, emotional rewards, and neuroeconomics interactions. The concluding section discusses the capacity of organizational neuroscience to employ analyses of this kind.

Behavior analysts have traditionally adopted the individual organism as their unit of analysis. However, by treating the organization that is the marketing firm as a contextual or operant system in its own right, and by assuming that the function of such a firm is to pursue marketing- or customer-oriented marketing, it becomes feasible to interpret the behavior of its mangers in terms of the context provided by its customers.

The relationships between the marketing firm and its customers can be conceptualized in terms of bilateral contingencies (Foxall, 1999a). The essence of this approach is that the behavior of an organization is greater than/different from that of the combined repertoires of its members. This conception, which has always been integral to the concept of the marketing firm, is supported by recent thinking in organizational behavior analysis which envisions the behaviors of organizational members as enmeshed in interlocking behavioral contingencies (Glenn, 2004; Biglan and Glenn, 2013). In both systems of thought, the behavior of the system is inferred from the outputs it produces. Hence, each element of the marketing mix—product, price, the promotional communications and distribution systems—affects consumer behavior in such a way as to make the behavior of the organization predictable and explicable. To adopt this kind of analysis is to consider the behavior of an organization or other collectivity of individuals in operant terms, to understand it as a contextual system.

Consideration of the marketing firm as a contextual system has hitherto been confined to the behavioral analysis, in terms of utilitarian and informational reinforcement, of the relationship between its behavioral outputs and their reception by the market and to the scope of the behavior settings of the firm and its customers (Vella and Foxall, 2011, 2013). This has entailed the description and explanation of the firm's behavior in terms of operational measures of behavioral consequences and behavior setting. This is “Market-Exchange Analysis” which is briefly described below. It is feasible, however, to extend the analysis of the marketing firm as a contextual system by comprehending marketer and customer behaviors in neurophysiological terms. This is pursued below in terms of two further analyses: that of the emotional rewards received by consumers and firms as a result of their mutual interactions (“Affective-Reward Analysis”), and that of the capacity of the signals each party to the transaction receives from the other as RPEs that influence its own behavior (“Neuroeconomic Analysis.”)

Market-exchange analysis concerns the overt relationships between the marketing firm and its customer base (Figure 4). The task of marketing management is to plan, devise and implement marketing mixes that deliver satisfactions for the firm's customer base that are profitable for the firm. The components of the marketing mix (product, price, promotion, and place utilities) appear in the market place initially as MOs and discriminative stimuli for the consumer behaviors of browsing, purchasing, and consuming. Purchasing includes the exchange of money for the ownership of the legal right to a product or service and this pecuniary exchange acts as a source of both utilitarian reinforcement (in the form of resources that can be paid out or reinvested) and informational reinforcement (in the form of feedback on corporate performance) for the marketing firm. The efficacy of Rm (managerial behavior) in fulfilling the professional requirements of marketing management, namely the creation of a customer who purchases the product at a price level sufficient to meet the goals of the firm, is determined by the generation of profit and reputation for the firm (depicted by the dotted diagonal line in Figure 4). This consumer behavior (Rc) also acts as MOs and discriminative stimuli for further marketing intelligence activities, marketing planning and the devising and implementation of marketing mixes that respond to the stabilities and/or dynamic nature of the behavior of the customer base (Vella and Foxall, 2011, 2013; Foxall, 2014a).

At this level of market interaction between the enterprise and its customer base, managerial behavior can be viewed as maximizing a utility function of the form shown for the individual consumer in Equation (1), comprising a combination of utilitarian reinforcement and informational reinforcement.

The second analysis of bilateral contingency is that which exists between individual managers in the marketing firm pursuing marketing-oriented management, as a strategy of the entire enterprise, via marketing management, the responsibility of the marketing function, and their consumers (Figure 5). The relationships between manager and consumer are maintained at this level of analysis by the reciprocal generation of emotional rewards or satisfactions, particularly pleasure, arousal, and dominance (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974; see also Foxall, 2005).

This hypothesis is supported by the theoretical demonstration of relationships between felt emotion and operant learning as well as by empirical work, albeit with consumers, that shows patterns of emotion to vary consistently and predictably with patterns of reinforcement as defined by the BPM. At the theoretical level, Rolls (1999) suggests a link between learning and emotional reward by proposing that the stimuli that act as reinforcers for behavior also function as elicitors of emotional responses. At the empirical level, there is extensive evidence that consumers respond to retail and consumption environments rich in utilitarian reinforcement with pleasure; to those rich in informational reinforcement with arousal; and to more open settings in terms of dominance. Moreover, consumer behaviors for a wide range of such environments (including the time and money consumers spend within them) has been shown to be determined by these three emotional responses (Foxall, 2011; Foxall et al., 2012; Yani-de-Soriano et al., 2013). Figure 6 summarizes the results of research that indicates a unique pattern of emotional reaction is found for each of the eight BPM-defined contingency categories. We may reasonably conjecture that the responses of individual managers to the reward environments they encounter as members of marketing firms can also be construed in terms of pleasure (derived from utilitarian reinforcement), arousal (informational reinforcement) and dominance (open settings). Although we cannot base this assumption on direct empirical research as is the case for consumer behavior, Mehrabian's theory of emotional responses to environmental cues (Mehrabian, 1980) provides a general warrant for drawing the general conclusion that individual managers' emotional reactions to their reward environments are emotionally reinforced.

Regarding pleasure, arousal, and dominance as primary adaptations, it should be possible to identify their neural substrates, their evolutionary significance and their implication in adaptive behaviors (Mehrabian, 1980). Barrett et al. (2007) confirm Mehrabian and Russell's (1974) judgment that pleasure, arousal, and dominance are fundamental to the mental representation of emotion and relate them to reinforcement and punishment (see also Russell and Barrett, 1999; Barrett, 2005; Kober et al., 2008; Lindquist et al., 2012). Moreover, Panksepp's (1998, 2005, 2007) seven core emotional systems – SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC, PLAY—correspond at a general level to pleasure, arousal and dominance (Foxall, 2008). Figure 7 proposes a broader classification which incorporates PLEASURE and POWER/DOMINANCE following the suggestion of Toronchuk and Ellis (2010).

The third level of bilateral contingency is that obtaining between individual marketing managers and the firm's consumerate depicted as reciprocally generating reward predictions which engender behaviors that reinforce one another's conduct (Figure 8). The ways in which the imminence of rewards is signaled to managers by the behaviors of the consumerate and vice versa may be depicted in terms of “RPEs” between the expected rewards and the actual rewards achieved (Schultz et al., 1997). These signals, which form a strong core of neuroeconomic analysis (Glimcher, 2011) are discussed in detail below after a distinction is made between two styles of neuroeconomics and their relative relevance to the analysis of bilateral contingency.

The grounds on which both organizations and their separate members may be understood as contextual systems are as follows. Each manager's behavior is constrained by the behavior setting in which he/she works and by the pattern of reinforcement available to him/her. The manager's behavior setting scope/dominance is determined to some extent by his/her ability to manage the structure of this pattern of reinforcement and the scope of the behavior setting, and by his/her ability to influence other managers' setting scope and pattern of reinforcement. But we can also speak of the corporate behavior setting and of the pattern of reinforcement that follows from the delivery of corporate outputs (in terms of marketing mixes) to the marketplace (Vella and Foxall, 2011, 2013). The corporate behavior setting is composed of the strategic scope of the firm, predominantly its product-market matrix which defines the kind of organization it is, its purpose, the nature of its customer base and therefore the wants it is attempting to fulfill. It will also embrace the firm's overall policies, goals and objectives, and, following its resource audit, its capabilities, all of which determine the way in which it views novel opportunities and dangers as signaled by the marketplace and comparative competitive advantages. The reception its marketing mixes receive from customers determines the success of the firm and thus the extent to which its overall behavior pattern remains constant (providing similar marketing mixes) or changes (devising new or modified mixes). The two aspects are related in that success or failure in the marketplace may lead to a reassessment of the firm's scope and a consolidation of or change in its strategic direction (Foxall, 2014b).

What these examples have in common is that they relate individual human behavior, which is a personal level phenomenon, to the super-personal level of environmental contingencies which in each case are observable and measurable; the pattern or sequence of such contingencies can, therefore, be related systematically to the pattern or sequence of individual behavior; the behavior can then be presented as a function of its consequences. The result is a functional explanation of molar patterns of behavior that invokes the correlational law of effect (Baum, 1973). The behavior of the firm as a whole, i.e., the emergent generation of a marketing mix, is by definition not a personal level phenomenon. We may designate it supra-personal insofar as it is different from, greater than, over-and-above the combined behaviors of the members of the firm. The fortunes of the firm, as we have argued, depend on the reinforcing and punishing consequences of such behavior which in turn rely on the reception the marketing mix receives from the consumerate. Such organizational behavior depends at some level on the neurophysiological events responsible for the behavior of the firm's individual members, just as it depends on those managers' behavior being reinforced and punished by its immediate consequences that determine the success or failure of each manager. But there is no justification for ascribing a neurophysiological level of analysis to the organization. There is no way of combining or averaging the neurophysiological events of each manager to produce a composite measure that would explain the behavior of the organization. There is no bilateral contingency that links firm level behavior with that of the consumerate via meaningful neurophysiological mechanisms. All of the relevant interactions between firm and consumerate, i.e., those that predict and explain the behaviors of each, can be described at the supra-personal level (in the case of the firm) and the personal level (in the consumerate).

However, we can isolate a useful mode of explanation in terms of the emotional rewards that individual managers and individual consumers receive, each as a result of the behavior of the other. There is another useful explanatory mode at the level of neuroeconomic RPEs that result for managers from the behaviors of consumers and for consumers from those of managers. The managerial behavior that influences consumer choice may actually be that of the firm.

The chief implications of the foregoing for organizational neuroscience lies in clarification of the kinds of investigation that can reasonably be conducted within this emerging framework of conceptualization and analysis. The argument is that neurophysiological explanation, in contrast to that of operant psychology, cannot be extended beyond the individual. This means that, although operant psychology may find an expression in the study of supra-individual systems such as organizations like the firm, this mode of investigation is denied to organizational neuroscience. The chief implication for the development of consumer behavior analysis and the concept of the marketing firm is that the super-personal level of analysis, in which the behavior of the firm is understood in terms of the effects that its emergent outputs (notably marketing mixes) have had on its primary environment, namely its consumerate, may be underpinned by organizational neuroscience as long as this is confined to the behavioral implications for individual managers and consumers and not abstracted to the organizational level of analysis. All of the modes of analysis advocated here can be supported by the identification of bilateral contingencies that closely link the behaviors of the transacting parties via observable and operational variables; those which have not been supported by the foregoing analysis are not realized in bilateral contingencies.

At the supra-personal level of exposition, firms' behaviors can be identified in terms of the marketing mix elements they introduce to the market (and these, in turn, can be traced back to their marketing intelligence procedures, their goal-formation through strategic audits of their comparative capabilities and the opportunities of the marketplace, their strategic and marketing planning, the devising and implementation of their marketing mixes). The fortunes of these marketing mixes can be ascertained through analysis of their impacts on sales and profitability. These are not easy measures to obtain in practice but attempts to secure them form part of the feedback mechanisms on which firms rely. It is feasible at this level of analysis to identify a firm-level behavior setting and learning history, and therefore a firm-level situation; the behavior attributable to this corporate situation has implications for the behavior of the firm's consumerate whether this comprises a mass of individual consumers whose collective actions amount to what Biglan and Glenn (2013) nominate macro-behavior (Figure 9) or one or more corporate customers the behavioral outputs of which can be characterized as metacontingency (Figure 10)

The equivalent of supra-contingency at the level of the individual consumer or manager is the super-personal level of explanation. Super-contingency refers to the control of an individual's behavior by contingencies of reinforcement, the operant conditioning paradigm exemplified by the three-term contingency. Although this level of exposition stands alone as a means of predicting individual behavior, especially in the relatively closed settings of the operant chamber, its explanatory power may be extended by considering the sub-personal, neuronal, ramifications of operant reinforcement. As the earlier discussion shows, the receipt of reinforcers is mediated by RPEs and leads to emotional reactions that reflect the pattern of reinforcement. At the super-personal level of exposition, both consumer and managerial behavior can be associated with patterns of rewards and punishments: a large body of research on the BPM has established this for consumer behavior and a far larger range of research studies have endorsed the principle for managers.

At the personal level of exposition, intentional idioms may be ascribed in the explanation of behavior as long as the ascription is limited so as to be consonant with empirical research findings at the super-personal and sub-personal levels (see Foxall, 2004, 2007a,b, 2013). This personal level of exposition differs from the other levels in providing an interpretation of behavior that employs intention idioms rather than the extensional language of science. That is, it proceeds in terms of beliefs and desires, emotion-feelings and perceptions that are necessary to render the behavior intelligible. Intentional exposition is used when extensional language no longer suffices to provide an understanding of behavior, principally when the stimuli responsible for behavior cannot be identified. The super-personal and sub-personal levels of exposition are integral to this personal level since they are instrumental in the creation and support of the intentional idioms that enter into personal level interpretation. Hence, in the context of neuropsychology, the sub-personal level of exposition involves the neurophysiological events that enter into interpretations of behavior in intentional and decision-making terms (Dennett, 1969; Foxall, 2007b,c).

The affect-reward and neuroeconomic levels of analysis introduced in this paper involve the super-personal, personal, and sub-personal levels of exposition. They refer to the behavior of single individuals rather than to organizational behavior (Figure 11)

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.