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The aim of this research is to provide insight into how organizations can co-create value with family members engaged in service journeys of customers experiencing vulnerabilities, thereby paying attention to their organizational practices (i.e. recursive or routinized patterns of organizational actions and behaviors).

To investigate, this research relies upon a multiple case study in a group of nursing homes in Flanders that had the ambition to engage family members in service journeys of their loved ones while measuring their value perceptions as a performance indicator (here, satisfaction with nursing home services).

The case evidence shows that nursing homes co-create value with family members through caring practices that focus on their role as secondary customers (i.e. welcoming, connecting and embedding) and empowering practices that focus on their role as partial employees (i.e. teaming up, informing and listening practices). However, the way in which the different caring and empowering practices are enacted by the nursing home and its staff affects their value co-creation potential.

By focusing on the practices with which organizations can co-create value with family members engaged in service journeys of their loved ones, this research bridges the service literature with its attention for value co-creation practices and the literature on customers experiencing vulnerabilities with its focus on extended customer entities.

This paper aims to provide insight into communication strategies that may enable service ecosystem actors to co-create economic, social and/or environmental value.

To achieve this end, the authors rely upon the literature on value propositions, which represent strategic tools for communicating about the value package (i.e. the benefits that actors can offer to one another along with its costs). This literature stream – in combination with the communication literature – allows the authors to unravel five dilemmas that service ecosystem actors face when communicating about the value package with one another.

To co-create value in service ecosystems with the help of value propositions, actors need to reflect upon (1) whether to involve third parties when sending messages about their value package (cf. sender), (2) what information to share about their value package (cf. message), (3) whether to invest resources in face-to-face communication when conveying messages about the value package (cf. channel), (4) whether to reach out to a broad audience with value package messages (cf. receiver) and (5) whether to engage in institutional work through communication in response to various interpretations of messages about the value package (cf. effect).

This research advances the literature on value co-creation in service ecosystems by relying upon communication theory to unravel the dilemmas that come along with using and/or creating value propositions as strategic tools for communication.

The widespread integration of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled personalization has sparked a need for a deeper understanding of its transformative potential. To address this, this study aims to investigate the mental models held by consumers from diverse cultures regarding the impact and role of AI-enabled personalization in their lives (i.e. individual well-being) and in society (i.e. societal well-being).

This paper uses the theories-in-use approach, collecting qualitative data via the critical incident technique. This data encompasses 487 narratives from 176 consumers in two culturally distinct countries, Belgium and Pakistan. Additionally, it includes insights from a focus group of six experts in the field.

This research reveals that consumers view AI-enabled personalization as a dual-edged sword: it may both extend and restrict the self and also contribute to an affluent society as well as an ailing society. The particular aspects of the extended/restricted self and the affluent/ailing society that emerge differ across respondents from different cultural contexts.

This cross-cultural research contributes to the personalization and well-being literature by providing detailed insight into the transformative potential of AI-enabled personalization while also having important managerial and policy implications.

Service networks are inherently complex as they comprise of many interrelated actors, often driven by divergent interests. This can result in imbalance, which refers to a situation where the interests of at least one actor in a network are not secured. Drawing on the “balanced centricity” perspective, the purpose of this paper is to explore the causes of imbalance in complex service networks.

Adopting a qualitative case-based approach, this paper examines a public health service network that experienced imbalance that was detrimental to the lives of its users: the Mid-Staffordshire National Health Service (NHS) Trust, UK. Drawing on service-dominant logic and stakeholder theory, case evidence provides insight into the origin and drivers of imbalance in complex public service networks.

The origin of imbalance stems from competing institutional logics of various actors (patients/public, employees, managers, regulatory bodies, etc.), but the degree to which these competing institutional logics lead to imbalance is moderated by accountability, communication, engagement, and responsiveness within the service network.

By uncovering causes of imbalance in complex public service networks, this paper pinpoints important research avenues for developing the balanced centricity perspective.

The inherent existence of multiple parallel institutional arrangements makes networks imbalanced, but value creation can be achieved when the appropriate mechanisms are fostered to manage balance between divergent logics.

By examining imbalance as the underlying cause of network dysfunction, this research contributes to understanding of the dynamics in, and performance of, complex public service networks.

Over the last 50 years, increased attention for personalization paved the way for one-to-one marketing efforts, but firms struggle to deliver on this promise. The purpose of this manuscript is to provide a complete picture on personalization, develop a future research agenda and put forth concrete advice on how to move the field forward from a theoretical, methodological, contextual, and practical viewpoint.

This research follows a systematic literature review process, providing an in-depth analysis of 135 articles (covering 184 studies) to distill the (1) key building blocks and components of personalization and (2) theoretical, contextual, and methodological aspects of the studies.

This manuscript uncovers six personalization components that can be linked to two personalization building blocks: (1) learning: manner, transparency, and timing and (2) tailoring: touchpoints, level, and dynamics. For each of these components, the authors propose future research avenues to stimulate personalization research that accounts for challenges in today's data-rich environments (e.g. data privacy, dealing with new data types). A theoretical, contextual, and methodological (i.e. industry, country and personalization object) review of the selected studies leads to a set of concrete recommendations for future work: account for heterogeneity, embed theoretical perspectives, infuse methodological innovation, adopt appropriate evaluation metrics, and deal with legal/ethical challenges in data-rich environments. Finally, several managerial implications are put forth to support practitioners in their personalization efforts.

This research provides an integration of personalization research beyond existing and outdated review papers. Doing so, it accounts for the impact of new technologies and Artificial Intelligence and aims to advance the next generation of knowledge development on personalization.

Today's sharing economy covers a variety of business models. This research aims to (1) identify dimensions along which sharing businesses may vary and (2) investigate how these dimensions influence consumer engagement while considering consumers' sustainability orientation.

This research relies upon a systematic literature review (n = 67 articles) to identify five sharing business dimensions: (1) ownership transfer, (2) professional involvement, (3) compensation, (4) digitalization and (5) community scope. A discrete choice conjoint experiment in the fashion industry is employed to investigate how these dimensions affect consumer engagement with sharing businesses (n = 383 participants).

The results suggest that ownership of tangible resources elicits more engagement than access to tangible resources for both consumers with a low sustainability orientation and consumers with a high sustainability orientation. Community scope also affects consumer engagement as reflected in more engagement towards sharing businesses with a local rather than a global scope. The presence of professional service providers, monetary compensation and a digital platform only induces engagement among consumers with a low sustainability orientation.

This research generates a better understanding of how sharing businesses can draw on business dimensions to engage consumers with different levels of sustainability orientation and, in turn, how sharing businesses can realize their economic and/or circular potential.

The aim of this study is twofold: (1) to gain insight into the different perspectives on the relationship between patient and person centeredness and (2) to learn more about the differences between non-academic and academic stakeholders in the healthcare system.

This mixed-methods study includes a scoping review on person and patient centeredness and in-depth interviews with patients, caregivers, staff and management of healthcare organizations. The data were analyzed by following the six phases of Braun and Clarke.

The analysis of the data showed four different perspectives on patient versus person centeredness: (1) they are synonyms; (2) one term is favorite; (3) they should be in balance; and (4) person centeredness is the surplus on top of patient centeredness.

There are different perspectives on patient versus person centeredness. Perspectives differ between people and can change over time. Some people feel like a patient all the time, other people feel like a person all the time, and some feel like a patient at one point in time and as a person at another point in time.

These different perspectives can have important implications for the so-called moments of truth. In their role as patients, people value functional encounters and in their identity as people they value meaningful encounters with caregivers.

By unraveling these different perspectives, novel insights were found in the different perspectives people can take.

Focal service providers increasingly involve customers in the decision-making about outsourcing parts of the service delivery process to third parties. The present study investigates how customers' outsourcing decisions affect the formation of the waiting experience with the focal service provider, by which the objective waiting time, environmental quality and interactional quality act as focal drivers.

To test our hypotheses in the context of cancer care, we gathered process data and experience data by means of a patient observation template (n = 640) and a patient survey (n = 487). The combined data (n = 377) were analyzed using Bayesian models.

This study shows that opting for a service triad (i.e. outsourcing non-core services to a third party) deduces customers' attention away from the objective waiting time with the focal service provider but not from the environmental and interactional quality offered by the focal service provider. When the type of service triad coordination is considered, we observe similar effects for a focal service provider-coordinated service triad while in a customer-coordinated service triad the interactional quality is the sole experience driver of waiting experiences that remains significant.

By investigating the implications of customer participation in the decision-making about outsourcing parts of the service delivery process to third parties, this research contributes to the service design, service triad and service operations literature. Specifically, this study shows that customer outsourcing decisions impact waiting experience formation with the focal service provider.

Several researchers struggle with designing, writing-up and reviewing case study research, but constructing a template for describing and justifying methodological choices is – in contrast with quantitative research – undesirable due to the creative nature of qualitative research. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the multitude of paths to rigorous case study research and promote rigorous case study research in the service community.

Based upon a review of seminal articles and textbooks, different paths to rigorous case study research are identified. Subsequently, these paths are compared with existing practices in case studies in service research published between March 2017 and April 2019.

Seminal articles and textbooks detail different paths to achieve rigor with regard to research purpose, design, data, analyses and write-up. Overall, the most popular paths in the service community are those proposed by Eisenhardt and Yin. Meanwhile, service researchers increasingly challenge the dichotomy between the inductive and deductive logic by choosing an abductive logic. Transparency and reflexivity are the main points of attention among service researchers doing case study research.

By providing insight into the multitude of paths to rigorous case study research along with their popularity in the service community, this paper helps service researchers to balance rigor and creativity when engaging in case study research. Additionally, this paper offers a framework for reviewing case study research in terms of rigor and creativity.

Dyadic interactions between customers and service providers rarely occur in isolation. Still, there is a lack of systematic knowledge about the roles that different types of nontechnological third parties – that is, other customers, pets, other employees and other firms – can adopt in relation to customers and service providers during encounters. The present study aims to unravel these roles and highlight their implications for customers, service providers and/or third parties.

This research relies on a systematic review of literature in the Web of Science using a search string pertaining to the research study’s objectives. In total, 2,726 articles were screened by title and abstract using clear inclusion and exclusion criteria, thereby extracting 189 articles for full-text eligibility. The final sample consisted of 139 articles for coding and analysis.

The analyses reveal that other customers, pets, other employees and other firms can adopt five roles: bystander, connector, endorser, balancer and partner. Each role has different implications for customers, service providers and/or third parties. Additionally, the five roles are associated with distinct constellations of the customer, the service provider and the third party. These roles and constellations are dynamic and not mutually exclusive.

This research contributes to the service encounter literature by providing a thorough understanding of the various third-party roles and their implications for customers, service providers and/or third parties during encounters. As such, this research sheds light on the conditions under which third parties become “significant others” in service encounters and identifies avenues for future research.