Consumers on the Job: Contextualization Crafting in Expert Services

Abstract

Tasked with a greater role in the coproduction of expert services, consumers often face an immense burden in coproducing service and well-being outcomes. While some prior research has explored customer work, we delineate unique aspects of expert services and articulate consumer efforts that transpire outside the dyadic service interaction. Through netnographic inquiry in a health care context, we find that coproduction efforts are job-like and require job crafting efforts. Upon this foundation, three major themes emerged: (1) consumers leverage their context expertise by adapting content expertise to their unique circumstances, (2) consumers develop and deploy strategies (hacks) through affordances in order to manage their coproduction jobs, and (3) consumers move through the expert service journey in a variety of ways that shift them toward or away from well-being outcomes. After assessing the transferability of our results by analyzing a second expert service context (financial services/debt management), we suggest implications for theory, practice, and future research.

Aesthetic Work as Cultural Competence: Chasing Beauty in the Coproduction of Aesthetic Services

“…McColl-Kennedy et al (2012) find that consumers who work to integrate resources in health services are more satisfied and have a higher quality of life (Sweeney, Danaher, and McColl-Kennedy 2015). However, active participation in coproduction can be stressful (Blut, Heirati, and Schoefer 2020) and involve burdensome demands (Azzari et al 2021). Furthermore, consumers who are more involved in coproduction may have higher expectations and thus experience greater dissatisfaction when these expectations are not met (Heidenreich et al 2015).…”

“…Different services require varying levels of consumer collaboration for coproduction. When coproducing a cultural experience, consumers might only provide general guidance (Minkiewicz, Bridson, and Evans 2016); but in the case of financial or health care services, they often provide more input (Azzari et al 2021; Bradford and Boyd 2020; Guo et al 2013; McColl-Kennedy et al 2012). In highly customizable services, consumers may undertake extensive work (Etgar 2008).…”

“…Consumers are also important resources in the coproduction process since aesthetic evaluations are subjective (Cova and Dalli 2009; Maciel and Wallendorf 2017). Prior research on participation in coproduction suggests that consumers’ efforts are job-like (Azzari et al 2021), referring to them as partial employees (Bettencourt et al 2002), potential competitors (Bitner et al 1997), and resource integrators (Hibbert, Winklhofer, and Temerak 2012). Regardless of the label, these active consumers participate in sharing insights and resources to help the service provider meet their needs in the value cocreation process (Cova and Dalli 2009; McColl-Kennedy et al 2012).…”

“…Recent research argues that the coproduction of services is context-dependent, extending beyond the provider–consumer dyad (Azzari et al 2021; Ng, Plewa, and Sweeney 2016; Spanjol et al 2015) to “encompass a broader variety of customer roles, behaviors, and resources during the service process” (Mustak, Jaakkola, and Halinen 2013, 348). The consumers’ value network can include family, friends, or peer-to-peer communities on digital platforms that share and produce content (Azzari et al 2021). Consumers draw on these private and public resources to develop knowledge and skills to coproduce services (Anderson, Hamilton, and Tonner 2016; Sweeney, Danaher, and McColl-Kennedy 2015).…”

“…First, we expand the idea of aesthetic work to include not only the efforts of the service organization but also those of the consumer (Vilnai-Yavetz and Rafaeli 2006; Yu and Sangiorgi 2017). We therefore build and expand on the consumer work literature in service coproduction to understand how consumers collaborate with service provides in aesthetic coproduction (Azzari et al 2021, Sweeney, Danaher, and McColl-Kennedy 2015). Second, we offer a cultural competence framework to identify and understand four types of coproduction in aesthetic services: aesthetic codesigning, aesthetic consenting, aesthetic yielding , and aesthetic reigning .…”