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Neuroscience offers a unique opportunity to elucidate the role of mental phenomena, including consciousness. However the place of such phenomena in explanations of human behavior is controversial. For example, consciousness has been construed in varied and conflicting forms, making it difficult to represent it in meaningful ways without committing researchers to one species of consciousness or another, with vastly different implications for hypothesis development, methods of study, and interpretation of findings. We explore the conceptual foundations of different explications of consciousness and consider alternative ways for studying its role in research. In the end, although no approach is flawless or dominates all others in every way, we are convinced that any viable approach must take into account, if not privilege, the self in the sense of representing the subjective, first-person process of self as observer and knower of one's own actions and history, and the feelings and meanings attached to these. The most promising frameworks in this regard are likely to be some variant of nonreductive monism, or perhaps a kind of naturalistic dualism that remains yet to be developed coherently.

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to go beyond the received view, which is solely rational and economic minded, and to introduce the concept of self‐regulation of behavior by salespersons and customers as essential mechanisms for initiating, maintaining, and resolving business‐to‐business exchanges.Design/methodology/approachBy reviewing emerging research, this paper examines the role of positive and negative social and self‐conscious emotions in salesperson‐customer interactions and how salespersons and customers cope with the response of these emotions so as to better function and adapt to their own, their organizations, and the interpersonal needs of their relationships and to do so mindful of the requisites of co‐workers and the common good.FindingsFour positive emotions were singled‐out as essential to salesperson‐customer relations: pride, attachment, empathy, and emotional wisdom. Six negative emotions were highlighted as key processes in salesperson‐customer relations: guilt, shame, embarrassment, envy, jealousy, and social anxiety. Some research was reviewed as well, suggesting that cultural factors in the form of different self‐construal (e.g. independent versus independent‐based self‐images) moderate the expression of felt positive and negative emotions and their effects on performance and relations with customers and co‐workers.Originality/valueThe ideas presented in this paper can complement economic and other extreme rational explanations of salesperson and customer behavior and point to new practices in such managerial areas as staffing, training, coaching, compensating, and promoting employees.