Coordination mechanisms and the role of taskscape in value co-creation: The British ‘milkman’

Abstract

Service-dominant (S-D) logic holds that coordination mechanisms contribute to value cocreation. This research explores everyday social interaction processes in Britain's nocturnal, recurrent milk doorstep-delivery service. It uses ethnographic fieldwork with service providers (‘milkmen’) and semi-structured customer interviews and online feedback to enrich understandings.Space-time-culture dimensions are linked with existing S-D logic conceptions of value cocreation. Using Ingold’s (1993) perspective, the doorstep becomes a taskscape, with dwelling activities, a temporality of rhythmic interrelations, and patterns of resonance – uniting practices and institutions.(Interactive) dwelling activities, (reliable) rhythms, and (contextual) romanticization are the central coordination mechanisms in this iconic service, and shape micro-, meso- and macro-level interactions. Their effect on value cocreation is considerable as they derive from mutual projections, reflections, and individual understandings of customers’ doorsteps as shared- temporally-located interaction taskscapes. This realizes value cocreation as part of the life of the world, performed amid its material, temporal and social entanglements.