SPECIAL ISSUES

The pursuit of upward social transformation through service design and practice demands rigorous thinking about what this kind of change looks like and how it comes about. To advance these two goals, this study conceptualizes transformative value, defined as a social dimension of value creation which illuminates uplifting changes among individuals and collectives in the marketplace. Conceptual development draws on structuration theory and the service-dominant logic to articulate the spheres of transformative value as well as four distinctions between habitual and transformative value. Ethnographic analysis with a nonprofit service, which focuses on mitigating the inequalities of poverty, explores how service providers can facilitate transformative value. Findings highlight the roles of holistic value propositions, an anti-structural servicescape, and communal service practices. Beyond micro-level social impact, findings also reveal the macro-level reach of transformative value by demonstrating how services can contest and transform dominant social structures and stimulate social action. Discussion highlights the implications of transformative value for human agency and ways to design services that promote well-being among vulnerable populations.

This study examines customer coproduction in a prolonged, complex, and negative service context—medication adherence in chronically ill individuals. We integrate services and medical perspectives to develop a novel theoretical framework of adherence as a nested system of coproduction behaviors, characterized by temporal and scope dimensions. Utilizing a qualitative approach, our findings point to two key insights about coproduction in the customer sphere. First, the enactment and form of regular-restricted, intermittent-intermediate, and irregular-expansive coproduction behaviors are determined by the characteristics of the customer sphere—that is, coproduction is contextualized. Second, the coproduction system in the customer sphere is complex and the different levels are interdependent. Our research contributes to the emerging literature on service coproduction by elucidating the behaviors through which customers strive toward adherence. The identified coproduction framework holds important implications for providers of prolonged and complex services and future research directions.

Social support is critical for improving patients’ health outcomes. People living with chronic diseases are often socially excluded and thus face many challenges in their lives. The type and amount of social support they receive from online health care communities can potentially enhance their quality of life. This research verifies emotional support, informational support, companionship, and relatedness as four categories of online social support pertinent in health care communities. In examining the detailed effects of multidimensional online social support on physical, psychological, and existential quality of life, this research finds that the impact of emotional support on psychological quality of life is most effective. An empirical survey of 349 participants finds that the influential outcomes of online social support on quality of life depend on stigmatized patients’ perceptions of their level of social exclusion. In general, stigmatized patients with high levels of social exclusion seek a variety of online social support and attain a more improved quality of life than those patients with lower levels of social exclusion. This research recommends that the health care sector emphasize patients’ synergies and develop online customer resources to extend the limited medical support available.

Transformative service research is particularly relevant in health care where the firm and customer can contribute to individual as well as societal well-being. This article explores customer value cocreation in health care, identifying a hierarchy of activities representing varying levels of customer effort from complying with basic requirements (less effort and easier tasks) to extensive decision making (more effort and more difficult tasks). We define customer Effort in Value Cocreation Activities (EVCA) as the degree of effort that customers exert to integrate resources, through a range of activities of varying levels of perceived difficulty. Our findings underscore the importance of viewing health care service as taking place within the customer’s service network that extends well beyond the customer-firm dyad to include other market-facing as well as public and private resources. Moreover, we demonstrate the transformative potential of customer EVCA linking customer EVCA to quality of life, satisfaction with service and behavioral intentions. We do so across three prevalent chronic diseases—cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. Our findings highlight how an integrated care model has benefits for both customers and providers and can enhance customer EVCA.

This research demonstrates how service firms can encourage decisions that enhance consumers’ well-being through informational social influence. Specifically, we propose that social information regarding the beneficial behaviors of others is enhanced under a deliberative mind-set. Given the financial insecurity of consumers, as well as the potential for financial services firms to positively affect consumers’ savings decisions, we test this theorizing in the context of savings. Four studies demonstrate that the open-mindedness associated with the deliberative mind-set increases the effectiveness of providing high savings social information (i.e., information about the high savings rates of others). This effect does not occur for consumers with chronically high susceptibility to interpersonal influence, who are open-minded to social information regardless of mind-set, but is stronger for myopically focused consumers who otherwise may be most likely to discount high savings information. Results suggest that financial services firms may improve consumers’ financial well-being by providing high savings social information and eliciting a deliberative mind-set in financial brochures, educational programs, and interactions with financial advisors. Implications for how service firms can utilize a deliberative mind-set and informational influence to enhance consumer well-being by encouraging beneficial behaviors like saving, exercising, or energy conservation, which conflict with existing desires, are discussed.

Personal well-being of service employees and others is declining, yet well-being is likely to influence on-the-job productivity.Workplace wellness programming (WWP) is prevalent among service organizations, but is controversial with critics questioning the appropriateness and efficacy of employer involvement in personal health. To understand how employers engage employees in personal wellness, we conducted a qualitative field study of WWP in 10 diverse organizations. We found lower employee engagement and higher resentment in firms that relied primarily on wellness training, incentives, and impersonal communications.
Employee engagement was higher in firms that collaborated with wellness-minded employees to (1) tap into long-standing, deeply held belief systems to forge an inspirational wellness ideology, (2) leverage social capital to recruit participants and resources, and (3) modify the physical environment to signal the importance of healthful behaviors and to reduce obstacles to healthful choices. The three strategies are pillars of social movement (SM) organization.Drawing on the rich SM literature and our fieldwork, we developed and tested an SM-inspired model for cultural and behavioral change. The findings have implications for internal marketing and social marketing theory and for managers seeking to create a culture of health and improve employee productivity and effectiveness in serving customers.

Although many consumers turn to financial counseling to improve their financial well-being, the effectiveness of these counseling services remains nebulous and the exact mechanisms through which they improve consumer well-being require further research. This longitudinal research demonstrates that consumers’ coproduction of financial counseling services is pivotal for increasing their credit scores and for decreasing their financial stress. Drawing on self-determination theory, this study also shows that financial literacy, consumer involvement, and attachment styles are important drivers of coproduction. Involvement plays a moderating role, such that higher involvement substitutes for lower levels of financial literacy and mitigates the negative effects of attachment avoidance on coproduction. These findings help both counseling agencies and public policy makers improve the effectiveness of financial counseling. Financial counselors should track their customers’ objective and subjective financial literacy, involvement, and attachment styles, then segment customers, and, finally, tailor the service provision accordingly, to leverage coproduction as the pathway to consumers’ financial well-being. From a public policy perspective, the findings suggest that efforts to improve consumer financial literacy are important but should be supplemented with programs designed to increase consumer involvement in financial counseling; this combination promises to foster coproduction and improve consumers’ financial well-being.

Many services, particularly those related to health care, can be considered high-risk in that despite service providers’ best efforts, consumers may not attain the outcomes they hope to achieve. Recent research highlights how cultural models regarding service providers influence the ways consumers experience and respond to failure. What bears investigating is how these cultural models and consumers’ related framings of failure shape consumer experience in high-risk contexts. Analyzing data from informants engaged with various types of infertility services, we develop a typology of four consumer experiential framings of failure that explore their experiences across three dimensions. These are as follows: the implicit cultural model that shapes relationships with service providers, the implicit cultural model regarding goal pursuit, and consumers’ tacit understandings regarding their appropriate courses of action in response to failure. We link each distinct type of experiential framing to consumers’ distinct set of expectations related to service recovery. And we offer insights for service providers on how to manage their relationships with consumers and (in the tradition of transformative services research) how to enhance consumer well-being.