Abstract
Our study applies legitimacy theorizing to service research, zooming in on co-prosumption service business models, which reside on significant direct contacts among provider-actors and customers as well as fellow customers in the service space. Our findings are based on a longitudinal flexible pattern matching method on 17 coworking spaces. The service cocreation nuances the double role of customers as evaluators and cocreators of legitimacy. This is because customers can have immediate perceptions of the actions and values of the services in their legitimacy evaluation while cocreating the service. Legitimacy shaped via social and recursive processes occurs in three stages: provisional, calibrated, and affirmed legitimacy. Findings inform four trajectory mechanisms of value-in-use pattern provenance, emergent Business Model development adaptive to the spatial context and loyal customers, visible trances as well as inside-out and outside-in identification processes. Further, the processes in the micro-ecosystem of an interstitial service space can develop a superordinate logic which overlays the potentially present coopetive and heterogenous institutional logics and interests of service customers.
Highlights
Service research is increasingly embracing institutional theory (Koskela-Huotari Vink, and Edvardsson 2020), encouraged by research on how institutional arrangements determine value cocreation in nested service ecosystems (Vargo and Lusch 2016), on institutional determinants on service innovation (Vargo, Wieland, and Akaka 2015), and on market shaping through institutional arrangements (Baker, Storbacka, and Brodie 2018)
We initially develop a conceptual framework by combining service and recursive legitimacy research on the double role of customers in the recursive and socially embedded legitimacy processes that inform trajectory mechanisms, reflecting on service Business Model (BM)
For services with a significant CoP context, we propose that the double role of the customer in the legitimacy process sets boundaries of future developments centered on the path taken
Summary
Service research is increasingly embracing institutional theory (Koskela-Huotari Vink, and Edvardsson 2020), encouraged by research on how institutional arrangements determine value cocreation in nested service ecosystems (Vargo and Lusch 2016), on institutional determinants on service innovation (Vargo, Wieland, and Akaka 2015), and on market shaping through institutional arrangements (Baker, Storbacka, and Brodie 2018). From the viewpoint of institutional theory, service organizations’ progress and survival depends on the “endorsement” of organizational legitimacy (Deephouse 1996: 1025). Key audiences such as investors (Tauscher, Bouncken, and Pesch 2021) evaluate organizational legitimacy (legitimacy, hereafter) upon the organization’s values and actions (Zimmerman and Zeitz 2002). The double role is nuanced when cocreation occurs in direct and simultaneous production and consumption of customers as specified by prosumption (e.g., Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry 1985) and in collective consumption contexts that define service encounters where fellow customers are directly co-present (e.g., Colm, Ordanini, and Parasuraman 2017). The social context coalesces past, present, and future service encounters from the viewpoints of customers and providers and accounts for trajectories that play out on the service provider’s
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