Ph D in Business Administration

Abstract
It is widely acknowledged that value can be regarded as interactively formed by customers through the integration of a variety of resources. However, it is difficult to find service research that takes these concepts seriously in empirical studies. Consequently, the aim of this thesis is to present an empirically grounded understanding of how customer resource integration takes place in practice and how customers experience their resource integration. By collecting data of public transport customers through qualitative diaries, interviews, and video recordings of situated action in addition to a survey, the thesis draws on script and practice theory.
The main contribution of the thesis is an empirically grounded model of customer experience of resource integration, which can be summarized in six propositions: (a) customers can acquire four different types of scripts: generic, incongruent, rigid, or transformative; (b) the script types are implicit parts of interactive value practices, which emerge as navigating and ticketing in the empirical context of public transport; (c) the interactive value practices are constellations of the resource integration activities of identifying, sense-making, and using, which customers focus on to varying extents, depending on their acquired script; (d) during or after interactive value formation customers potentially update their scripts; (e) customer processes, other customers, the physical environment, contact personnel, provider processes, and the wider environment all form the context of the service, but can also be resources that the customer integrates; and (f) the customer experience is a holistic evaluation of the interactive value formation and can be understood as consisting of three dimensions: a cognitive evaluation and two affective evaluations, positive activation and positive deactivation. As such, I reframe the notion of the servicescape in order for it to be more attuned to the perspective of interactive value formation and resource integration.
Order the thesis by sending an e-mail to: Britt-Marie Shandrew